Pagan ethics, liberalism, and the return of inherited order
There’s a reason so many of us are looking to the ancient world right now. Much of the West seems unable to explain what it stands for, what holds its people together, or what deserves to be passed down. We’re told we’re free to invent ourselves, yet so many of us are craving ancestry, belonging, and a place within a history that began long before us.
That hunger has drawn me toward Greek and Roman literature and the pre-Christian societies of Europe, where questions of honor, kinship, duty, and the preservation of order carried enormous weight. Those societies had their own failures, but they took seriously things our culture often struggles even to discuss: obligations we don’t choose, loyalty to the people we come from, and responsibility for what survives us.
It’s also what drew me to The Ark, whose creator joins me for this episode. I’ve been following his Substack, YouTube channel, and classical literature course, especially his exploration of what recovering a European pagan worldview would actually require. If we want to restore some order amid the chaos, what would that order rest on—and what would it demand of us?
One of his arguments that particularly caught my attention is that nature itself is amoral. Life includes predation, destruction, growth, and striving toward excellence. But recognizing those forces doesn’t tell us which ones should govern our behavior. If something occurs in nature, does that make it worthy of imitation? What gives us grounds to restrain one impulse and cultivate another?
Homer gives these questions human consequences. In The Ark’s reading, Achilles’ treatment of Hector and his eventual return to custom raise the question of what even the strongest warrior owes another person. Polyphemus’ rejection of Zeus’s laws of hospitality presents a related problem: what happens when someone recognizes no obligation beyond his own power?
This is where “might makes right” becomes an inadequate account of pagan morality. Strength matters, but so does what a person does with it. I wanted to press The Ark on what makes custom, hospitality, and reciprocal obligations binding, especially when someone is powerful enough to disregard them. His shift from a more Nietzschean outlook toward traditionalist paganism makes that question particularly interesting.
Ancestral continuity brings another dimension to this discussion. Understanding ourselves as part of a chain connecting ancestors and descendants challenges the idea that our lives belong entirely to us. It asks us to consider what we have inherited, what deserves preservation, and what our choices leave behind. That also opens up his critique of liberalism and the question of how much modern secular morality retains the Christian assumptions it claims to have outgrown.
There’s a (slight) disagreement I wanted to bring into the conversation, too. The Ark has expressed appreciation for paganized Christianity and the heroic Christ of medieval literature. Yet the Gospel teachings place discipleship above kinship (Luke 14:26), demand the renunciation of possessions (Luke 14:33), and instruct followers to turn the other cheek and love their enemies (Matthew 5:39–44). How does that fit with the ancestral obligations and heroic ethics we’re discussing?
If those heroic elements came from older pagan traditions, why use them to rehabilitate Christianity?
The Ark’s answer brought us back to the Arthurian literature that shaped his worldview in college. For him, those stories are a meaningful part of European history, and their Christian elements don’t erase their value or make them something we can simply discard. I can understand that attachment, even if I don’t share it. As I admitted during our conversation, there’s still plenty of “piss and vinegar” in my attitude toward Christianity after leaving the church, and finding appreciation for anything wrapped in it remains difficult for me. Our different experiences help explain why we approach that inheritance differently, even as we share an interest in recovering older traditions.
I close by asking The Ark which criticism of his worldview he finds hardest to answer, and whether wrestling with it has changed his thinking. I wanted to hear where he sees a serious challenge to his own interpretation of the pagan tradition.
Please listen to the FULL episode and let me know your thoughts in the comments.
On family memory, moral inheritance, and the cost of belonging
This is Part Three of a series that began with a question about participation: what have we lost by becoming spectators to experiences our ancestors once entered with their whole bodies? From there, the question became more personal. Part Two followed my own hunger for belonging through the communities, identities, and belief systems I had tried to make myself at home inside, and eventually toward something I have had to learn the hard way: belonging is not worth very much if I have to disappear in order to keep it.
I ended that essay writing about the ability to remain rooted when someone disagrees with me, to listen without disappearing, and to belong without surrendering conscience. At the time, those words felt like a conclusion drawn from everything I had already lived through.
I did not realize I was about to be tested on them in probably the most intense way possible.
All of this started in January of this year when I ordered an Ancestry DNA kit.
And, of course, after submitting my saliva, I had an absolute panic moment where I immediately regretted handing over my genetic data to who knows what private equity firm that is going to share it with whatever transhumanist agenda is out there.
Too late. The spit was already in the mail.
I also had absolutely no reason to expect the results would rearrange the story I had been told about myself.
My entire life, I understood my ancestry to be largely English, Scottish, and Irish. I grew up surrounded by the visual language that came with it too—green clovers, Irish imagery, fairies, Celtic-looking decorations, all the little symbols that become so ordinary in childhood that you stop noticing they are teaching you something about who you are.
That was simply where I came from. Or at least I thought it was.
So, when the results came back and said 50% Italian, I was absolutely shocked. Flabbergasted. Bewildered. Confused. Quite destabilized.
This meant something much more immediate: the man I had believed was my father could not be my biological father.
The matches made that difficult to deny. I recognized people on my mother’s side, and those relationships appeared exactly where they should.
But the paternal side was something else entirely.
That realization did more than change a percentage on an ancestry report. It made the story of my own origins suddenly unstable. The family line I had assumed was mine biologically wasn’t mine at all. The ancestry I had casually claimed my whole life, the family medical history I had repeated at doctors’ offices, the names and stories I understood as part of my inheritance—half of it had just fallen away in an afternoon.
There had always been a strange story around my conception. In 2016, while drunk, my mother admitted to me that she had felt guilty for all the times she had cheated on my dad while he was in prison. I had grown up hearing some convoluted explanation about being conceived when he was temporarily out because of good behavior, something involving a wedding, maybe a conjugal visit. Honestly, I don’t even know anymore. The timeline never completely made sense, but I never pushed very hard.
My family has always had something of a motto:
The past is the past. Let’s not talk about it.
Well…. DNA apparently did not get that memo.
Suddenly I had questions I had never expected to be asking at this point in my life. Who was my biological father? Who were these Italian people showing up in my matches? What was my actual paternal medical history? Had an entire family existed beside mine this whole time without me knowing it?
And there was another, stranger layer underneath all of that. If ancestry is one of the ways we orient ourselves in the world (through names, stories, land, family memory, inherited symbols) what happens when you discover that half of the map you were given was wrong?
And somewhere underneath the absurdity of that sentence was a much more unsettling question.
Who, then, were my people?
There was something intensely nauseating about reaching my forties and discovering that a foundational fact about my own identity had simply never been true.
My mother, predictably, denied everything at first and acted completely shocked. It took seven months of what I experienced as denial, contradictions, coping, and avoidance before she finally admitted that she had been in a relationship with an Italian man who ran a restaurant called the North Pole. The restaurant just happened to be on the route my mother traveled when she went to visit the man I had believed was my father while he was in prison.
He had gone to prison for dealing cocaine.
I would eventually learn that my newly discovered biological father’s world was also heavily entangled with cocaine.
My mother really knows how to choose them, huh?
The North Pole
Once I finally had his name, a family friend found an entire Facebook group dedicated to him and the North Pole. I started scrolling through years of photographs, stories, memories from old employees, people reminiscing about the restaurant and talking about how much they loved working for him. It sounded like he had built this iconic little world that people genuinely missed. He seemed charismatic and funny and generous. I learned that he died in a car accident in 2010, which meant that by the time I finally discovered who he was, I had already missed any possibility of ever meeting him.
And this is where my imagination started doing something I did not understand at the time.
I started building a family before I actually met one.
There were half-siblings, nieces and nephews, an entire network of people whose DNA overlapped with mine but whose lives had gone on for decades without me. I started thinking, Wow, what if this is it? What if this explains why I have always felt so disconnected from my own family? Maybe I had missed out on this warm, close Italian family I was actually supposed to have. Maybe these were the people who were finally going to understand me. Maybe I would have Christmases I actually looked forward to again. Maybe I would walk into a room full of relatives and experience some strange recognition that had always been missing.
Maybe everything was finally going to make sense.
Well…no. It did not.
Eugenio Zampighi, Happy Family (19th century).
The Family I Invented Before I Met Them
One particularly sad day, when I was feeling incredibly lonely and isolated, I took the gamble and reached out to the woman who managed the Facebook group. I had a suspicion that she was one of my half-sisters.
She responded within about ten minutes.
She told me that she had known about me my entire life. She said she had been waiting and praying to hear from me, and apparently there may even be another half-sister somewhere out there that neither of us knows. Immediately I was getting information that contradicted things my mother had told me, which by that point was hardly surprising.
What did surprise me was how positively she spoke about my mother. She told me how much she had adored her, how happy my mother had made her dad, how she had wanted them to get married. She would have been around fifteen at the time, so I tried to keep in mind that I was hearing the rose-tinted recollection of a teenage girl who had encountered a very specific version of my mother.
Still, it made me feel nauseated.
I have a lifetime of experiences with my mother that bear very little resemblance to the woman being described to me, and I have been estranged from her because of the dysfunction within my family. Sitting there listening to someone speak almost lovingly about her while I was already trying to absorb the fact that she had hidden my biological father from me for forty years felt surreal. But I tried not to immediately judge any of it. Two people can experience the same person very differently. I knew that. I wanted to be open.
Eventually Patrick and I went to meet my half-sister at a river house where she was staying.
When we first arrived, I was impressed. This was a gorgeous property, worth somewhere around two million dollars, and for a moment I was looking around thinking, Wait, is this our family money? Is this her money? What exactly did I just stumble into? I later realized that it belonged to her soon to be ex-husband, but at the time I knew almost nothing about any of these people.
Anyone who knows me also knows that I am hypervigilant as fuck. I walk into a room and notice approximately a thousand things immediately. Body language, tone, smells, identity markers, animals, exits, mess, tension, who seems uncomfortable, who seems too comfortable. I wish I could turn it off, but I cannot.
I had been very communicative about what time we would arrive, so she knew exactly when we were coming. When she opened the door, she looked like she had just gotten out of the pool, wrapped in a towel. Fine. Whatever. It was summer and people swim. But then we spent the next thirty minutes in the kitchen and she kept saying she was going to go change, only to become distracted by another story, then another, then five more.
The house was a disaster. I want to be fair about that because she was going through a divorce and moving out, and people going through a crisis are allowed to have messy houses. The mess by itself was not the issue. It was the totality of everything happening at once. Half-eaten food, trash and cups everywhere. Flies. She was smoking her cigarettes inside. Air conditioning blasting while the windows were open. She was buzzing around the kitchen, constantly adjusting her towel, starting one story and abandoning it halfway through to launch into another. I had brought her flowers and at some point, I found myself wandering around trying to locate something to put them in because she could not stay focused on one thing long enough to deal with them.
I remember being profoundly relieved that my husband had come with me, because I needed another person in the room who could later tell me that I had not imagined how uncomfortable the whole thing felt.
The property itself was one of the nicest places I had been to in a long time. Yet, the energy inside that house was some of the most destabilizing I had experienced in years.
I don’t know what was happening with her psychologically or medically. Patrick wondered afterward whether medication or something else had been involved, and I had my own questions, especially because she later spoke casually about cocaine use. But I cannot diagnose somebody based on spending one afternoon with her and I don’t need to. The observable experience was enough. My nervous system was screaming at me that something was off.
What troubled me even more was how little curiosity I felt coming toward me.
This woman had supposedly known I existed my entire life and had been praying for me to appear. I had just discovered that half of my biological identity was not what I thought it was. I had spent months trying to learn who my father was, discovered he was already dead, and then walked into a house filled with photographs, stories and memories belonging to people whose blood I shared but whose lives I knew absolutely nothing about.
I had an entire fucking life too.
Yet I kept feeling like there was plenty of room for me to absorb her stories, her family history, her understanding of everyone involved, her healing journey, her perspective on my mother and our father, but much less room for me whenever my own interpretation differed from hers.
At one point I tried to offer a different perspective during a conversation and the interaction escalated badly enough that she started yelling and I nearly walked out. Afterward it was brushed away with something along the lines of, That’s just Italians. That’s how we fight.
But I wasn’t raised in this family. I do not have some reservoir of childhood affection that turns being screamed at into charming cultural familiarity. To me, it just felt like being screamed at.
There wasn’t much of an apology or an attempt to understand why the interaction bothered me. That feeling would become important later.
Bittersweet
The most disturbing thing I learned during this period involved our biological father.
I found out that when he was in his thirties, he had sexually exploited a teenage girl. She eventually wrote about the experience in a memoir, and a week or two after meeting my half-sister I got a copy of the book.
I will admit that I skimmed most of it because the author had become a born-again Protestant Christian and there is enough Abrahamic worldview running through the thing to make my eye twitch. But then I reached Chapter Eleven, titled “Bittersweet,” and stopped skimming.
She describes herself at fourteen as a child living with alcoholic parents, receiving very little nurturing or stability at home. My biological father was thirty-four years old, married, and already a father. He entered her world through horses. He helped her ride, bought her things, took her places, fed her, praised her and gave her attention at a time when the adults responsible for her were failing badly.
Then, according to her own account, that relationship became sexual.
Looking back as an adult, she describes recognizing a pattern she could not recognize when she was fourteen: an older man exploiting the vulnerability of a hurting girl. She writes about feeling trapped and confused. She describes being pressured sexually and unable to tell her parents what was happening because her own home was so unstable. At one point she summarizes what remained afterward as “virginity stolen, trust violated.”
That was enough for me.
I remember my half-sister telling me about this and saying, “You know Catholic men, always wanting those virginal women…” I was truly disgusted. I told her how horrific it was, and she said, “Well, we all have good and bad parts in us.” Then came Ram Dass and some New Age copium, as if that could soften what she had just shared with me.
I did not need to spiritualize it. I did not need to search for the hidden blessing. I did not need to tell myself that complicated people contain light and darkness and therefore no moral judgment is ever appropriate. I did not need to forgive a man I had never met simply because half of my DNA came from him.
A thirty-four-year-old man pursuing and sexually exploiting a fourteen-year-old child is abuse.
And that man was my biological father.
This realization was especially disorienting because I had already spent weeks immersed in the Facebook memorial group, where he existed almost entirely through warm collective memory: the funny restaurant owner, the beloved boss, the larger-than-life personality, the guy who made people laugh and created a place they still remembered decades later.
Those memories did not necessarily become lies because I read the memoir.
That is part of what made this harder.
People who do terrible things are rarely terrible every second of every day. A person can be generous to an employee and predatory toward somebody else. He could have made people laugh. He could have been adored by his daughter. He could have created an environment that people genuinely remember with enormous affection.
Human beings are inconvenient like that.
But once I read this woman’s account, another voice entered the family story.
And the prettier memories could no longer be allowed to swallow hers.
That is where I started thinking about memory differently.
A family is partly made out of the stories it agrees to repeat. Certain stories become funny. Certain names become beloved. Certain things are excused, certain things are hidden, and certain things become things “we don’t talk about.” Over time, those repetitions harden into an identity.
I know something about that because I came from a family whose motto was essentially the past is the past.
But the past does not disappear because people become uncomfortable when somebody names it.
Baccio Bandinelli, Laocoön (1520–25)
What My Body Already Knew
There was more information I struggled with during that visit. My half-sister spoke very casually about cocaine and told me that it had been “always snowing at the North Pole,” meaning cocaine was apparently everywhere around the restaurant. I was learning that my biological father had also dealt cocaine, which meant that both men occupying the category of father in my life (the man who raised me and the biological father I had just discovered) had been cocaine dealers.
Again, apparently, my mother had a type.
(Sometimes dark humor is the only way I know how to metabolize information that would otherwise make me want to scream.)
The day after meeting my half-sister, I felt sick. I kept replaying everything. Patrick and I talked about how uncomfortable the visit had been, and he agreed that we should have left much earlier. It seemed like almost every story I had heard contained another piece of information that I wished I had never learned.
Still, I did not want to make a harsh decision too quickly. She was going through a divorce. Finding a biological sibling in middle age was obviously going to be emotionally strange. Maybe I had simply become overloaded. Maybe my hypervigilance was getting ahead of me. Maybe I should give her another chance.
Very shortly after I read the chapter in the memoir, she invited me back to the river house one last time so that I could meet her daughter—my newly discovered niece.
Even though I did not really want to go, I agreed.
And then my body had other plans.
The day before the visit I developed a wicked migraine that continued through the entire day I was supposed to see her. I physically couldn’t endure the long drive and social stimulation.
And staying home gave me something I had not really had since this entire discovery began: enough distance to hear myself think.
As the adrenaline wore off, I had to admit that I did not want this relationship. I did not want to go back to the river house. I did not want birthday parties and photographs and nieces and nephews suddenly being folded into my life because DNA had revealed that technically these people belonged to categories called sister and family.
I did not feel closer. I wanted distance.
Coming to this conclusion hurt because I had wanted this discovery to mean something else entirely. I had let myself imagine that biological family might finally provide some missing form of belonging. Instead, I found myself confronting a question I had already been writing about.
In The Death of the Performed Self, I wrote about transformation as something deeper than simply adopting a new vocabulary or worldview. Real transformation shows up as discernment, self-command, courage, and to stand firmly without requiring everyone around you to reassure you that you are standing in exactly the right place.
Apparently life decided I needed an immediate practical examination.
Because suddenly the thing being offered wasn’t an abstract community or ideology.
It was blood.
Two biological sisters. Nieces and nephews. An Italian lineage. Photographs of a father whose face might contain some clue about mine. An entire family story I had briefly believed could explain why I had spent so much of my life feeling disconnected.
And maintaining access to that fantasy would have required me to begin overriding myself almost immediately.
I would have needed to ignore how uncomfortable I had been. Explain away the yelling. Explain away the instability. Keep reminding myself that she was going through a hard time. Swallow my moral reaction to what I had learned about our father. Keep accepting photos and birthday invitations. Meet the niece. Smile. Try harder. Be open-minded. Do not hurt anybody’s feelings.
Most importantly: do not risk losing belonging.
I know that woman. I know the version of myself who would have done exactly that and called it compassion.
She has existed inside churches, relationships, political communities, spiritual worlds, friendships and my own family. She is very good at learning the correct vocabulary. She can figure out what everyone around her needs her to believe. She can abandon her own perception and call it humility. She can disappear inside belonging and convince herself she has finally been loved.
I have spent years trying to let that performed self die.
Sandro Botticelli, Calumny of Apelles (c. 1495)
When Truth Costs Something
Eventually I sent my half-sister a boundary message.
It took me days to write because I was trying so hard not to be cruel. I told her the experience had been overwhelming and destabilizing. I explained that learning what I had learned about our biological father had deeply disturbed me and that I had struggled with what I perceived as attempts to soften or rationalize his behavior. I told her that I did not want to build a relationship and that I needed distance.
Her response illuminated almost everything my intuition had been trying to tell me since the river house. She sent me nine or ten messages in a flurry.
She told me that she had forgiven our father and framed that forgiveness as part of healing.
Then there was another Ram Dass quote….of fucking course there was a Ram Dass quote.
Her telling me that she had forgiven him would not have bothered me by itself. That is her relationship to her father. She knew him. She loved him. She can make whatever peace with his memory she needs to make. I am not the sovereign authority over her conscience.
But neither is she the sovereign authority over mine.
What bothered me was the way forgiveness became evidence of healing, because suddenly there was an implied hierarchy between us. She had reached the spiritually mature interpretation, while my anger, disgust and refusal to forgive were positioned as something I had yet to work through.
And there it was again: the exact same sensation I had felt in the river house.
I was not merely being offered another way of seeing the situation.
I felt like I was being told which interpretation was the evolved one.
This is why I have become so suspicious of spiritual bypassing. Forgiveness can be meaningful and healing for someone personally, but the word becomes dangerous when it is turned into a moral cudgel. Anger becomes pathology. Disgust becomes evidence that you have not “done the work.” Moral judgment becomes something unenlightened people cling to because they have not yet transcended their ego.
No.
A friend, Torna Braggison, recently wrote about hamingja as a kind of luck or power strengthened through honorable action. One idea from that piece has stayed with me: anger can be a signal that something has crossed a line and needs a response. I don’t think every surge of anger is a flawless instruction. Mine can distort things too. But I also don’t want to treat anger as automatic proof that I am sick, stuck, or failing to heal.
Sometimes something really has violated your moral order. Sometimes disgust is appropriate. Sometimes refusing to forgive someone you never knew is not a wound begging to be healed.
And I absolutely refuse the idea that moral clarity is an illness from which I need to recover.
The conversation escalated after that. I eventually said things harshly. I told her that I had experienced our time together as profoundly unstable, that I had not felt much curiosity from her about my life or what any of this had done to me, and that I felt as though she wanted to control what I was allowed to think, say and feel.
Those words did not arrive serenely after a breathwork session.
I was pissed. I was hurt. I was activated.
Could I have phrased some of it differently once the adrenaline left my body? Absolutely.
But one of the hardest lessons of my life has been learning that regretting the sharpness of a statement does not automatically mean the truth underneath it was wrong.
That distinction matters when you have spent years interpreting every conflict as evidence that you must have failed.
Sometimes a boundary comes out ugly because the gentler versions did not work.
Sometimes your hands shake while you type it.
Sometimes you cry afterward.
Sometimes the truth does not sound enlightened.
The Three Fates, 1558 by Giorgio Ghisi
Ond, Words in the Well, and Blood That Is Not an Oath
This is where Ond has started to become far more than an interesting Heathen concept to me.
Ond is the sacred breath, the vital breath of life. In the Heathen material I have been studying, speech is intimately connected to it because words quite literally ride upon breath. We take something that exists privately within us and breathe it outward into relationship, community and memory.
That idea has been sitting differently with me after this experience.
Truth is very easy when nobody has anything to lose.
Integrity becomes harder when speaking honestly threatens belonging.
It is one thing to sit alone at a desk writing about the importance of remaining rooted. It is another thing to have a newly discovered biological sister standing on the other side of the sentence.
At some point truth has to move from inside the body to outside it.
You have to breathe. Then you have to speak.
There is another Heathen idea I have been thinking about throughout all of this: words placed into the well. Not all words carry equal weight. What we say casually to a stranger is not the same as what we say to family, friends or community. Words spoken within relationships become part of shared memory. They influence reputation, identity, trust, inheritance.
When I think about this now, I cannot stop thinking about that Facebook group.
It was, in its own strange modern form, a well of memory.
Photograph after photograph, story after story, people placing memories of my biological father into a common space. The restaurant everyone loved. The funny boss. The friend. The father. The charismatic guy who made people feel good and created something people missed decades later.
And then I opened a memoir. Another voice entered the well.
A fourteen-year-old girl’s. Her story does not erase everybody else’s.
But neither should their nostalgia erase hers.
That, to me, is where honor becomes different from reputation. Reputation can be built by repeating the most flattering stories. Honor requires making room for what is true even when the truth injures the story we would prefer to preserve.
Torna’s article gave me another way to think about the family part of this. He describes hamingja as something shaped by action and connected outward through family and community, like rings in a web.
“Acting with blatant dishonor is the worst thing you could do to your spiritual self. Not only would you have a lack of spiritual power and potency, it could also take your family generations to rectify your misdeeds causing your descendants to bear your shameful actions through no fault of their own.” —Torna Braggison
What one person does can become part of what the people around them have to carry, and the stories a family repeats help determine what gets passed along. That girl’s account belongs in the web too. So does my choice about whether I help cover it over.
That web also means I cannot simply declare myself separate and walk away untouched. The damage created by dishonorable action is called ohamingja—a negative inheritance that can move through a family and into its descendants. So, I can reject my biological father’s conduct and remain estranged from a mother whose actions I consider deeply dishonorable, but distance does not erase what their choices set in motion. I am still living with consequences I did not choose. The responsibility for what comes next belongs to me. I can live more honorably, tell the truth, keep my word and rebuild my own hamingja rather than passing the same secrecy, chaos and moral cowardice forward.
And this entire experience has made me think about blood differently too.
Blood is not an oath.
DNA can reveal biological relationship, but it cannot manufacture intimacy. It cannot command loyalty. It cannot obligate me to defend somebody I never knew. I share half of my DNA with my biological father, but I do not inherit his degeneracy or his excuses. I do not inherit anyone else’s nostalgia. I do not have to repeat my mother’s secrecy, and I do not inherit my half-sister’s forgiveness.
Biology can tell me where I came from. It cannot decide what I owe.
Kinship, at least in any meaningful sense, still has to be enacted through reciprocity, trust, words, deeds, character and time.
Relationship is something built. Not something detected in saliva.
This may be the greatest gift buried inside what has otherwise been one of the most disturbing years of my life.
For a brief period I really believed discovering my biological family might heal something ancient in me. I imagined the Italian family before I met them. I imagined Christmases with a full house, warmth, a family who had always wanted me, nieces and nephews, people who might somehow recognize me in a way my own family never had.
I am grieving that imagined family now too.
And maybe this is what standing rooted really means—not demanding that reality conform itself to the story I hoped would save me.
When I look backward at the hardest parts of my life now, I can see something I could not see while I was living through them. I know my vulnerabilities better. I know how badly I have wanted belonging. I know how susceptible I have been to charismatic people, authoritative belief systems, communities with one single permitted interpretation, people who speak with such certainty that I begin distrusting my own perception.
I know the seduction of being told, This is what healing looks like.
This is what being good looks like.
This is what being spiritually mature looks like.
This is what a good daughter looks like.
This is what a good Christian looks like.
This is what an enlightened person believes.
I have played that game before. Many times.
And this time, when the same dynamic appeared wearing an entirely different costume, I recognized it.
Not instantly. But sooner. And to me, that is a win.
Standing rooted does not mean I believe I am always right. Hypervigilance, trauma and anger can distort perception. I need people who challenge me, and I need the capacity to admit when evidence shows me that I am wrong. A tree that cannot move at all breaks in the wind. Roots are not rigidity. Roots make movement possible without losing the ground underneath you.
For a long time I thought honor had mostly to do with reputation—whether other people considered you good, whether you behaved properly, whether you were liked.
I understand it differently now.
Honor has something to do with whether your speech and your actions actually belong to the same person. Whether what leaves your mouth remains connected to what you know and believe inside yourself. Whether you can be trusted.
Especially by yourself.
That is why Ond has become such a powerful image for me. Breath originates inside the body and speech rides outward upon it. There should be some continuity between the two. Not perfection. Not impulsively saying every thought that passes through our minds. Not using “I’m just being honest” as permission for cruelty.
Continuity.
I do not want my mouth saying yes while every other part of me is screaming no.
I do not want to write publicly about integrity while living privately through appeasement.
I do not want to talk about truth and honor and then abandon both the moment they threaten to cost me something.
I’m beginning to believe that healing is much less glamorous than I used to think.
It is not pretending everything happens for a reason or turning every horrific thing into a lesson about love.
It is noticing the old pattern sooner. Leaving sooner.
Sending the difficult message.
Crying afterward because you genuinely wished the story had ended differently.
Grieving the family, you imagined without forcing yourself to belong to the family you actually found.
Maybe healing is being able to feel that ancient hunger for belonging rise inside you and still recognize when the price being asked is too high.
Biology can reveal my blood, but it cannot command my conscience.
And I can be more careful about what I place into the well.
These words are significant to me because they are carried on my own breath. They are part of the story I am choosing to leave behind me, and after a lifetime of learning how easily I could give my voice away in exchange for love, safety, certainty or belonging, I want the words I breathe into this world to actually belong to me.
Even when my voice shakes.
Even when telling the prettier story would have been so much easier.
Thank you so much for reading or listening! The audio always includes a few extra nuggets that aren’t in the written version, so give it a listen when you can. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!
When I first turned to Christianity, I wanted to do it right.
I did not wander casually into church, absorb a few inspirational sermons, call myself a Christian for six months, and wander back out again. I read through a roughly 1,600-page Wayne Grudem systematic theology book for fun, then I read another 600-page theology book. I read the Bible twice in two and a half years. I took Bible-study courses. I went to church. I participated in online study groups. I studied doctrine because I genuinely wanted to understand what (the fuck) I had committed myself to.
So, I find it deeply offensive when people approach me (or leave a comment here on Substack) now as though the reason I reject Christianity must be that I simply have not encountered the right version yet.
“Oh, but Megan, what about early Christianity?”
“But what about the mystical gnostic tradition?”
“But have you considered this alternative interpretation of the Hebrew scriptures?”
“But ancient and medieval Christianity had a strong pagan current.”
“But the division between Abrahamic and pagan cultures isn’t really that clean.”
I know.
I understand the reinterpretation. I reject the substrate.
This is exactly what I have written about in my work on Jesus as a literary construction: modern spirituality seems constitutionally incapable of allowing Jesus (or Christianity itself) to remain historically particular. Jesus is endlessly reinvented as an Aryan, enlightened teacher, universal sage, revolutionary, mystic, some ascended master or cosmic Christ, pagan-adjacent philosopher, psychological archetype, or whatever else is necessary to rescue him from the religious architecture that produced him.
The rough edges are continually sanded away until Christianity becomes something the modern interpreter already wanted to believe.
And frankly, it is not my fault that you are still high on copium.
It is not my fault that you cannot face the reality of the Mosaic distinction. By this I mean what the Egyptologist Jan Assmann identified as a profound transformation in the history of religion: the emergence of a theological distinction between true and false religion. In many ancient polytheistic worlds, foreign gods could be translated, compared, identified with one another, or incorporated into an existing religious landscape without requiring the conclusion that everyone else’s gods were simply unreal. The Mosaic distinction introduces a fundamentally different logic: there is a true God and false gods, legitimate worship and idolatry, revelation and error. Religious difference is no longer merely difference; it become theological falsehood.
It is not my fault that you have not wrestled seriously with histories like The Darkening Age, or with the long destruction, suppression, absorption, and replacement of the classical knowledge and religious worlds that existed before Christian domination. Whatever debates remain over individual episodes or interpretations, the Christianization of the Roman world was not simply a peaceful exchange of ideas in which one spiritual option organically prevailed. Temples were closed and often destroyed, pagan sacrifices were prohibited, traditional cults lost legal and political protection, sacred spaces were appropriated, and older practices were reclassified as superstition, idolatry, or demonic error. Pagan traditions did not merely “blend” with Christianity on equal terms; increasingly, they barely survived within a political and theological order that denied them equal legitimacy.
It is not my fault if the ancient historical spirit (the memory of the Roman people, the pagan peoples, our ancestors) has been lulled to sleep beneath generations of theological and psychological conquering. By that I mean the loss of cultural memory that occurs when the worldview of the victor becomes so normalized that people begin interpreting the defeated traditions through the categories of the religion that displaced them. Gods become “myths,” ancestral rites become “superstitions,” sacred places become curiosities, and Christian reinterpretations are treated as the natural culmination of what came before. After enough generations, conquest no longer feels like conquest because its assumptions have become the background architecture of thought itself. We are still burdened by Abrahamic supremacy through its metaphysical assumptions, its ontological lies and its corrupt theology.
That is why I am not interested in being told that Christianity contained a “strong pagan current,” as though the survival of pagan material somehow dissolves the distinction between the traditions. Cultural absorption is not the same thing as theological continuity, and syncretism under conditions of unequal power is not evidence that the conquered worldview survived intact. Sometimes the pagan residue inside Christianity tells us less about Christianity’s openness than about how extraordinarily difficult Europe’s older religious worlds were to erase.
And I am certainly not obligated to crawl back into the framework because someone has discovered a more mystical way of decorating it.
Of course, history is complex.
Of course, cultures interact.
Of course, Christianity absorbed enormous amounts of pagan philosophy, imagery, customs, sacred geography, ritual, and symbolism.
That does not make Christianity pagan.
And pointing to the pagan material Christianity absorbed after centuries of conquest is not the devastating rebuttal some people seem to imagine it is. In many cases, it proves the opposite: pagan culture was so deeply rooted that it could not simply be erased. It had to be absorbed, renamed, subordinated, and Christianized.
Interaction does not erase difference.
Syncretism does not erase domination.
And complexity is not a solvent that magically dissolves every meaningful distinction.
This endless need to redeem Christianity is precisely what I am exhausted by.
People hear me say, “I reject this framework,” and somehow translate it into, “Please introduce me to a more sophisticated version.”
No.
I have studied the scriptures, the doctrines, the apologetics, and the internal arguments.
Walking away was not an easy feat.
This photograph is my enormous systematic theology book and my Bibles ripped apart and thrown away means something very different to me than it probably does to you. Deconstruction was not an intellectual parlor game. The pain of walking away from the Church was beyond anything I expected. I had physical, visceral responses. I was covered in hives. I gained weight. The psychological torture reached down into my soul at a depth I still struggle to explain.
I had built a world inside that framework.
Then I followed the broken threads of its doctrine until I found my way back out of the Abrahamic framework altogether.
That process cost me something.
So no, I do not appreciate (not even an ounce) when somebody who has not bothered to understand who I am, what I studied, what I believed, or what it cost me to leave decides to waste my fucking time explaining that Christianity is actually much deeper, more mystical, more pagan, more esoteric, or more sophisticated than I realize.
You are not revealing the hidden level of the game to me.
You are reenacting the exact mechanism I am criticizing.
The assumption underneath all of these conversations is that Christianity must remain redeemable. If I reject the obvious form, someone produces the mystical form. If I reject the mystical form, someone produces the historical nuance. If I reject that, someone dissolves the categories altogether: perhaps “Abrahamic” and “pagan” were never really so different.
Anything except allowing the possibility that I understand the tradition and still find its underlying architecture unacceptable.
That is the spiritual hamster wheel.
There must always be another interpretation.
Another layer.
Another secret teaching.
Another version of Jesus.
Another way to salvage the thing you cannot bear to relinquish.
But I have already relinquished it.
My Heathenry does not require me to turn Christianity into disguised paganism so I can make peace with it. I do not want to make peace with my enemies. I do not need Jesus reconstructed as Dionysus, a universal consciousness, or an esoteric solar principle. I do not need the Hebrew scriptures alchemized into some secret perennial wisdom before I am permitted to judge what I actually find there.
And I can study the differences without compulsively collapsing them into some universal spiritual soup.
Perhaps that is what some people find intolerable.
Because once you stop insisting that every tradition secretly teaches the same thing, you have to make judgments. You have to admit that religions contain competing metaphysics, competing moral visions, competing conceptions of humanity, competing relationships to divinity, nature, ancestry, authority, and the sacred.
And then you might have to choose.
I chose.
So, when I tell you that I have no interest in Christianity, and in fact I have a burning blood memory full of hatred for it, believe me the first time.
I do not need the deeper version.
I do not need the mystical version.
I do not need the pagan-friendly version.
I do not need Christianity rescued from Christianity.
I understand the reinterpretation.
I reject the substrate.
Sources and Further Reading
The authors below do not represent a single school of thought, nor do they necessarily agree with every conclusion I draw. Together, however, their work informs my analysis of Jesus as a literary construction, the scriptural formation of biblical narratives, the Mosaic distinction, and the suppression and absorption of Europe’s pre-Christian religious worlds.
Jesus Mythicism and the Literary Construction of Christ
Paul-Louis Couchoud, The Creation of Christ: An Outline of the Beginnings of Christianity, translated by C. Bradlaugh Bonner, 2 vols. (London: Watts & Co., 1939).Originally published in two volumes, Couchoud’s work traces the development of Christ from an apocalyptic and prophetic heavenly figure into the increasingly historicized Jesus of the written Gospels. The second volume also contains his essay “The Historicity of Jesus.” These are the two PDF volumes I recently had printed for further study.
Richard Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt (Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2014).
Earl Doherty, Jesus: Neither God nor Man—The Case for a Mythical Jesus (Age of Reason Publications, 2009).
Robert M. Price, The Christ-Myth Theory and Its Problems (American Atheist Press, 2011).
Biblical Narrative, Myth, and Scriptural Construction
Thomas L. Thompson, The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel (Basic Books, 1999). Published in the United States as The Bible in History: How Writers Create a Past.
Thomas L. Thompson, The Messiah Myth: The Near Eastern Roots of Jesus and David (Basic Books, 2005).
Thompson’s work is especially important to my understanding of biblical characters and messianic narratives as literary products shaped by older Near Eastern traditions, recurring royal motifs, and scriptural patterns. Thompson should not simply be collapsed into the modern Jesus-mythicist movement; his work addresses the literary and mythic construction of biblical figures through a distinct scholarly framework.
Monotheism and the Mosaic Distinction
Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Harvard University Press, 1997).
Jan Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, translated by Robert Savage (Stanford University Press, 2010).
Assmann’s concept of the Mosaic distinction describes the revolutionary division between true and false religion introduced by biblical monotheism. This distinction altered how religious difference could be understood: other gods and forms of worship were no longer merely foreign or different, but false, illegitimate, idolatrous, or demonic.
Christianization and the Classical World
Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World (Macmillan, 2017).
“Truth can be both our shield and sword in the battle of life.”
There are people who influence us not only through what they teach, but through the manner in which they live what they teach.
Over the last several months, my friend Torna Braggison has offered me a remarkable degree of openness, patience, friendship, and spiritual guidance. He has answered my many questions, challenged me to think more deeply, and helped me better understand a Heathen worldview that cannot be reduced to symbolism, abstract belief, or solitary spiritual consumption.
Torna is the author of Power Through Truth, an exploration of the relationship between sacred breath, truthful speech, oath-keeping, honor, and spiritual power within the Heathen tradition.
His guidance has continually returned me to something more demanding: conduct.
How do we speak?
What do we promise?
Do our actions uphold our words?
Can the people closest to us trust what comes out of our mouths?
What happens to us (personally, socially, and spiritually) when they cannot?
What if truth is not merely something we believe, but something we breathe, speak, promise, remember, and live?
Ask and Embla, Robert Engels, 1919. Odin’s gift of Ond—the sacred breath that gives life and carries the spoken word.
Truth Is Not Merely an Idea
Modern people are accustomed to treating truth primarily as a matter of intellectual agreement.
We ask whether a proposition is correct, whether a doctrine is factual, or whether someone possesses the proper beliefs. Religion often becomes a matter of assenting to particular claims. Politics becomes a competition between competing narratives. Online identity becomes a collection of publicly declared values.
But declaring a value is not the same as embodying it.
A person can speak endlessly about compassion while behaving cruelly. Someone can build an identity around authenticity while lying to the people closest to them. A spiritual leader can speak of love, healing, transcendence, and divine truth while refusing accountability for the damage caused by their conduct.
Words alone do not prove character.
Within the framework Torna presents, however, words are not inconsequential. They are not merely sounds, opinions, or disposable expressions. They are carried upon the sacred breath and given force through the character and intention of the speaker.
Torna describes Ond as the sacred breath of life, the divine spark gifted by Odin. Our words ride upon that breath, and when we speak, we give those words a kind of life. Their quality is connected to the truth, intention, and honor of the person speaking them.
Speech therefore becomes more than communication.
It becomes participation.
We breathe something of ourselves into the world.
The Breath Behind the Word
In Völuspá, Odin’s gift to Ask and Embla includes Ond—the animating breath without which they do not yet fully possess life. Torna connects this sacred breath to speech, creativity, ecstatic power, ritual, galdr, and the ability to shape reality through will and expression.
This does not mean that every passing sentence is a magical incantation in the theatrical or New Age sense.
It means that speech carries consequences.
Words can establish trust or destroy it. They can bind people together, orient a community, transmit memory, establish obligation, inspire courage, or leave another person spiritually and emotionally disoriented. A truthful word spoken at the right moment can restore someone’s sense of reality. A deliberate lie can make another person doubt their own perception.
Our words affect the world because other people must live inside the reality those words help create.
This is one reason truth matters so deeply to me.
I do not want truth to remain an attractive principle I discuss in essays or podcasts. I want the people in my life to know that my word means something. I want to follow through when I make a commitment. I want to be honest even when honesty is uncomfortable. I want to recognize when my conduct contradicts what I have claimed and accept the responsibility of repairing what I can.
That is not always easy.
Truth as lived accountability demands more than being “right.” It demands self-examination, restraint, memory, courage, and humility. It may require us to admit that we have behaved dishonorably. It may force us to stop protecting the version of ourselves we would prefer others to believe.
Truth can defend us, but it can also cut through our own self-deception.
It is both shield and sword.
Words in the Well
One of the most compelling ideas in Torna’s article is that some words carry more weight than others.
He distinguishes between common or everyday speech, words placed “in the well” through intimate or sacred relationships, and the giving of formal oaths. Each carries a different degree of personal, communal, and spiritual consequence.
We all understand this intuitively.
Telling a cashier that we are “fine” when we are having a terrible day does not carry the same moral weight as lying to a spouse, deceiving a close friend, betraying a confidant, or breaking a solemn vow.
The closer the relationship, the more of ourselves we place behind the word.
Words spoken to those who trust us become part of a shared memory. They shape how another person understands us, themselves, and the relationship between us. Words spoken during ritual enter the memory of the group. Stories told by the skald or bard help shape a people’s understanding of their ancestors, heroes, virtues, and obligations.
These are words placed into the well.
The well can be understood as Mímir’s well, ancestral memory, cultural memory, or the accumulated memory of the community. What is spoken does not simply disappear after the vibration leaves the air. It continues through consequence, reputation, story, recollection, and relationship.
A truthful word can strengthen the speaker and those who hear it.
A dishonest word can poison the well.
“The Spiritual Weight of an Oath”: John Bauer, Tyr and Fenrir
The Spiritual Weight of an Oath
An oath carries the greatest weight because an oath is not merely a prediction about what we hope to do.
It is an act of binding.
Torna describes an oath as something given life through sacred breath and powered by the will. The oath involves not only the person who gives it, but the recipient, the witnesses, the place, and the spiritual powers invoked or present. Until it is fulfilled or broken, the oath continues to possess force.
This is almost incomprehensible within a culture of casual promises.
We say, “I’ll call you tomorrow,” “I’ll always be there,” “You can trust me,” or “I swear I’ll change,” often with little awareness of the weight those statements carry for the person receiving them.
Our society encourages constant speech while teaching very little discipline of speech.
We post immediate reactions. We make dramatic declarations. We promise more than we can deliver. We publicly perform virtues we have not yet cultivated privately. We use language to manage how others perceive us, then become resentful when we are held accountable to the identity we presented.
A Heathen understanding of oath asks us to become more careful.
Do not promise lightly.
Do not offer your word merely to relieve the discomfort of the present moment.
Do not invoke trust when you are unwilling to behave in a trustworthy manner.
The answer is not to become silent, emotionally unavailable, or terrified of commitment. It is to understand that a promise contains part of the self. When we repeatedly keep our word, we become someone whose speech possesses weight. When we continually break it, our words become thin and useless.
Eventually, no one believes us… and that isn’t because they are cruel, but because we have taught them not to.
Honor Is Accumulated
Torna connects the keeping of oaths with Hamingja, a concept often translated as luck but also associated with honor, power, fortune, and the accumulated strength of the self.
This is not luck imagined as random cosmic favor.
It is closer to luck that has been cultivated.
A person who consistently acts with integrity develops trusted relationships, a dependable reputation, communal support, and an internal sense of coherence. Their words and actions reinforce each other. They become spiritually and socially substantial.
Keeping one’s word strengthens the whole self, while dishonorable conduct weakens it.
We might recognize this even without using explicitly spiritual language.
A trustworthy person is often surrounded by people willing to help them because they have proven that help will not be wasted. Their reputation opens doors. Their community remembers their conduct. When hardship comes, they are not entirely alone.
This is not always fair or perfectly reciprocal. Honorable people can still be betrayed, harmed, or abandoned. But the larger principle remains: character accumulates.
So does dishonor.
Every promise kept or broken becomes part of the person we are becoming.
Truth as Communal Participation
Truth is often framed as an individual possession: my truth, my beliefs, my authenticity.
But Torna’s article presents truth as profoundly relational.
As a bard and skald, he writes that believing in the moral truth of a story allows the teller to connect with those listening. Honest words can create a communal experience in which teller, listener, folk, hero, deity, moral teaching, place, and ancestral memory are brought into relationship.
Truth does not merely sit inside the mind.
It passes between people.
It is sung, remembered, witnessed, and enacted.
This is where the concept becomes essential to The Wisdom of Participation. Traditional cultures did not generally understand humans as isolated consumers of spiritual information. People gathered. They sang. They told stories. They made vows before witnesses. They remembered their dead. They carried inherited obligations. They participated in the maintenance of a shared moral world.
The skald did not simply deliver “content.”
The community did not merely observe.
Everyone present became part of the remembering.
This is radically different from a spirituality centered on private revelation, personal vibration, or self-created metaphysical truth. The well does not belong to the isolated ego. It contains the memory of relationships—between the living, the dead, the Gods, the land, and those yet to come.
What we place into that well matters.
Bragi, Carl Emil Doepler, 1882. Bragi, the Norse god of poetry and eloquence, represents speech as sacred craft: words shaped through memory, rhythm, truth, and responsibility. The skald does not merely entertain, but gives voice to the stories and values through which a people remembers itself. Public domain.
No One Can Embody Truth on Our Behalf
Christianity famously places the words “I am the way, the truth, and the life” into the mouth of Jesus.
In that worldview, truth is ultimately embodied in and accessed through a singular salvific figure. The believer is asked to place faith in that figure and the theological claims made about him.
The Heathen framework explored here places the emphasis elsewhere.
Truth is not merely a person to profess belief in. It is a standard we must demonstrate through conduct.
No savior can keep our promises for us.
No doctrine can repair the trust we have broken.
No spiritual identity can substitute for honest speech.
No declaration of belief can transform dishonorable behavior into honorable behavior.
Truth must be renewed each time we speak carefully, fulfill a commitment, admit a wrong, make recompense, resist convenient deception, or allow our actions to bear the weight of what we have claimed.
It must be breathed and lived.
The Question Before Us
My upcoming conversation with Torna Braggison will explore the relationship between Ond, speech, oath, honor, memory, galdr, storytelling, and spiritual power.
But beneath the terminology lies a deeply human question.
What kind of person does my speech reveal me to be?
Do my words give life, orientation, and trust to the people around me?
Do I make promises carelessly?
Have I confused saying the right things with becoming an honorable person?
Have I demanded truth from others while excusing dishonesty in myself?
And when I fail, am I willing to make recompense rather than simply inventing a more flattering story about what happened?
Truth is not merely the absence of false information.
It is the alignment of breath, speech, memory, promise, and deed.
It is the weight accumulated when we repeatedly prove that our words can be trusted.
It is what we place into the well.
It is what others will remember.
And it is what remains when every attractive spiritual claim has been stripped away and only our conduct is left to speak for us.
The Lessons of Asgard– WorldTree Publications, 36pgs. Completely revised, with original kennings to the Gods by Torna Braggison. An introductory study of the principle Gods & Goddesses in the lore.
Flow Arts, Festival Ritual, and the Lost Wisdom of Participation
Hey hey, welcome back to Taste of Truth, this essay is much different than what I normally write, I hope you enjoy this trip down memory lane with me.
For years, strangers would see me walking through an airport, across a college campus, or into a music venue carrying an enormous circle of plastic and ask the same question:
“Is that a hula hoop? What do you do with that thing?”
I usually smiled.
There was no quick way to explain what the hoop had already done with me.
By then, it had bruised my hips, taken over my living room, earned me the nickname “hula-hoop girl” around my college campus, and sent me driving and flying across the country in search of music, teachers, festivals, and other people who understood why it was impossible to put the thing down.
It had carried me onto stages I was terrified to enter. It had introduced me to women I first knew only by their YouTube names and later came to know as teachers, collaborators, friends, and soul sisters. It had given me a language for my body at a time when I was still deeply self-conscious inside it.
At the time, I thought I was learning tricks.
I was learning how to float the hoop from my waist above my head. How to reverse its current. How to move in both directions. How to toss, pause, break, roll, and recover. How to follow a drum solo until movement and music stopped feeling like separate things.
All of that was true.
But something much deeper was happening
This is the first part of a series I have been circling around for a long time, though I didn’t fully realize it at first.
I thought I was writing about hoop dance, festival culture and the importance of ritual.
Then philosophy.
Then paganism.
Then neuroscience.
The deeper I followed the thread, the more I realized they were all pointing toward the same question:
What happens to human beings when participation is replaced by spectatorship?
I keep returning to the difference between knowing about life and actually participating in life.
Modern people are drowning in information about health, spirituality, community, nervous system regulation, trauma, meaning, embodiment, and connection. We have the podcasts, the books, the frameworks, and an ever-expanding vocabulary. We can analyze our attachment styles, map our trauma responses, name our nervous system states, and explain exactly why we feel disconnected.
And yet, so many of us are still lonely….
Still disembodied.
Still watching life through glass.
Still trying to think our way into something the body may only truly recover through embodiment, through rhythm, movement, expression, shared presence, and practice.
This piece is about that hunger.
The ancient hunger beneath modern life.
Not merely the hunger to believe something, but the hunger to belong to a living world again.
For a long time, I thought my years in flow arts were simply a chapter of my life—a beautiful one, but ultimately behind me. Looking back now, I see something different.
Long before I studied philosophy, mythology, neuroscience, religion, or ancestral traditions, my body was already being introduced to a way of knowing that none of those books could have given me.
It had to be practiced. Repeated. Failed. Felt. Shared.
It had to be participated in.
Before philosophy gave me language for participation, my body had already spent years practicing it.
Long before I studied mythology, ritual, paganism, or the neuroscience of embodiment, I had already encountered something those traditions were trying to describe.
I knew it through music. Through movement. Through repetition. And most importantly through community.
By the simple act of showing up, again and again, until something inside me changed.
I no longer interpret every part of those years the way I did in my twenties.
But I trust the experience more than I trust all the language I once wrapped around it.
And that is where this story really begins.
Long before I studied heathenry/paganism,
I danced it.
The First Forms of Participation
Before there was a circle of plastic spinning around my waist, there were trees to climb, horses to ride, ponds to swim in, and twenty-six acres that gave my body somewhere to go. Some of my earliest memories are not of sitting still and thinking about the world, but of moving through it—crossing the dam, wandering the property, climbing high enough to see everything differently.
There was one enormous oak tree that had fallen and become something like a fort. I would retreat there after arguments with my mother, disappearing into its branches and hollows until I felt like myself again. I would not have called that nervous-system regulation. I would not have called it ritual, grounding, or communion with place. I only knew that the tree could hold something I did not yet know how to carry.
Movement was also part of my life in more formal ways. I took ballet, tap, and jazz, although jazz was the form I loved most. Ballet often made me painfully aware of my body—how tall I was, how much space I occupied, how unlike the smaller girls I sometimes felt. Jazz gave me more room. There was something about the music, the costumes, and the freedom of the movement that allowed me to step outside that self-consciousness for a while.
Music offered another kind of participation. I played piano and violin, but orchestra was where something larger began to reveal itself. Practicing alone mattered, but it was never the whole point. The real experience happened when everyone entered together: dozens of separate parts becoming one piece of music that none of us could have made alone.
I did not have words for why that felt so powerful. I only knew the difference between playing a part by myself and feeling it take its place inside a living whole.
The tree was not merely scenery.
The orchestra was not merely a collection of individuals.
Movement was not merely exercise.
Each required me to enter into a relationship—with a place, a rhythm, a group of people, or the limits of my own body. I could not understand any of them from the outside. I had to climb the branches, learn the music, miss the step, lose my place, and begin again.
Looking back, I can see that I was learning the same lesson in different forms: the world became more alive when I participated in it.
I did not yet know that this was a kind of knowledge. I only knew that I felt most like myself when I was moving, making, playing, or contributing one small part to something larger.
The hoop would eventually gather all of this into a single practice—movement, rhythm, repetition, music, play, place, and community.
It did not create the longing.
It gave the longing a shape.
The Circle Opens
One of my roommates and I, playing around with those rinky-dink store-bought hula hoops.
That shape arrived rather unceremoniously in the winter of 2005: a cheap, store-bought hula hoop that I could barely keep spinning around my waist.
At first, it was mostly frustrating. The hoop fell almost as quickly as I could lift it, clattering against the floor while I tried again. Eventually, though, my body found the rhythm. I carried it back to college, where I practiced in the living room while my roommates laughed, none of us realizing what had begun.
That first hoop was a toy. The real initiation came the following summer at Smilefest, a music festival held at Deerfields in North Carolina.
There, I picked up what hoopers called a “real” hoop—large, heavy, handmade, and nothing like the lightweight plastic circle I had been struggling with. I could feel the difference immediately. Its weight slowed the movement enough for my body to follow. For the first time, the hoop did not seem like an object I was trying to control. It felt like something I could enter into conversation with.
I practiced until dark bruises spread across both hips.
Then I strapped the enormous hoop to the roof of the car and brought it home.
Something had taken hold of me.
I began carrying the hoop everywhere. I practiced alone in backyards and parking lots, using my car stereo for music. I watched early YouTube videos of hoopers like Hoopalicious, Spiral, Christabel Zamor, and the Hoopnotica dancers, calling my roommates into the room whenever someone performed a movement I could not imagine being possible.
“Look at this. How does she do that?”
There were tutorials, but no explanation could place the movement inside my body. I could watch someone perform a trick dozens of times. I could study the position of her hands, the angle of the hoop, and the direction of its current. None of that meant I could do it. The knowledge had to travel another route.
I had to pick up the hoop.
I had to drop it.
I had to feel where the movement broke down, make some tiny adjustment I could barely name, and try again.
One of the clearest memories I have from that period is standing in the front yard during my junior year of college, listening to the same music over and over while trying to raise the hoop from my knees back toward my waist. I had watched other people do it. I understood, in theory, what was supposed to happen.
But my body did not know yet.
Then, after what felt like endless repetition, something shifted. The hoop caught. My knees and hips found the pulse. The circle began to rise.
I could not have explained what I had done differently.
My body simply understood.
That moment opened a door. Once I felt the movement happen, I knew the other tricks were possible too because I had experienced the difference between knowing what a movement looked like and then knowing it from within.
The Circle Widens
That question did not remain private for long.
In March 2007, only about a year after I first began seriously hooping, I found myself waiting beside a stage in Boulder, Colorado, preparing to perform with EOTO for the first time.
For weeks, I had told everyone how excited I was. I was going to hoop onstage with Jason Hann and Micheal Travis—two musicians from String Cheese Incident (the jam band I had spent the previous summer following across the country.) Until that moment, the whole thing had felt thrilling and almost unreal.
Then it was time to walk onto the stage.
The excitement dropped straight into the pit of my stomach.
Holy shit. I’m really getting up there.
At that very moment, Jamie Janover, one of the other musicians came over, he had noticed how nervous I was and gave me a piece of advice I have never forgotten:
“Just go up there when you’re feeling the groove and get off when you’re done. It’s simple.”
He was right, although it did not feel simple while I was standing there.
There was no choreography to memorize and no fixed sequence waiting for me. EOTO was an improv jam band. The musicians were listening and responding to one another in real time. The audience was responding to the music. To join them, I had to stop thinking about how I looked, listen with my entire body, and enter the moment already unfolding.
I could not calculate my way into it.
I had to feel when to step forward.
For the first time, I was no longer simply hooping to music.
I was moving inside it.
Inside the Music
Once I crossed that threshold, the road opened quickly.
Music was not something playing quietly in the background while life happened elsewhere. It organized our movements, our travel, our friendships, and our sense of time. We planned entire summers around gathering beneath stages and temporary tents. We drove for days to arrive somewhere that would exist for only a weekend, then disappear almost as quickly as it had formed.
For those few days, however, we were not merely an audience.
People danced, cooked, camped, taught, performed, built installations, traded food, shared supplies, carried one another’s equipment, and stayed awake until sunrise. Musicians improvised with one another onstage while dancers responded from the crowd. The boundary between performer and participant was more porous than it appeared.
Symbiosis Music Festival 2007
When there was room, I stepped onto the stage with my hoop. Other times, I danced in the field among everyone else. Both experiences were deeply impactful in my dance practice. Whether hundreds of people were watching me or no one was, I was learning to respond to rhythm rather than impose myself upon it.
The music moved, so I moved.
The hoop changed direction, so I followed.
The crowd surged, softened, shouted, or fell quiet, and the whole atmosphere changed with it.
At its best, it felt less like a performance than a conversation occurring through bodies.
Over time, the women I had once watched with awe became people I practiced beside. Some became teachers, troupe members, collaborators, and friends. I moved to Portland at the end of 2007 and joined Kaivalya Hoop Dancers, entering a community that took the practice seriously while still preserving its sense of play.
I spent Portland’s rainy season obsessively practicing reverse currents. I wanted to move comfortably in both directions, even though one side initially felt completely unnatural. I repeated barrel rolls, breaks, pauses, and reversals until the awkward side slowly became less foreign.
Then severe back pain forced the practice to change again.
At twenty-three, there were days when preparing food or standing for longer than twenty minutes felt nearly impossible. I worried that I would lose the thing that had given my life so much momentum. I could no longer rely on constant waist hooping or the larger, more physically demanding movements that had once filled my practice.
But limitation created another kind of education.
I began exploring pauses, tosses, reversals, off-body movement, and smaller gestures that did not aggravate my back as severely. What initially felt like an interruption became a new creative vocabulary. The hoop was still teaching me, but now the lesson was adaptation.
Participation did not mean forcing myself through pain. It meant listening closely enough to remain in relationship with the practice as my body changed.
Hoop Dance Workshops from all over the country
Eventually, I began teaching more.
At festivals and community gatherings, I watched people pick up hoops with the same awkward uncertainty I had once felt. Some were convinced they could not do it. Others laughed the moment the hoop dropped. I learned that teaching movement required more than explaining where to place the feet or how to push the hips.
Sometimes I demonstrated.
Sometimes I offered a small correction.
Sometimes the most useful thing I could do was give someone enough room to fail without feeling embarrassed.
The moment when a movement finally entered another person’s body was unmistakable. Their face changed. The effort briefly disappeared. What had seemed impossible became available to them from the inside.
At EmergNsee Music Gathering (2008) in Oregon, I taught a HoopYoga and hoop-dance workshop attended by Meghan the Kat, one of the performers who had inspired me during my earliest years following String Cheese Incident. There was something beautifully disorienting about teaching a person I had once watched from a distance.
The hierarchy I had imagined between teacher and student dissolved.
She had given something to me through her movement. I had taken it into my own body, practiced it, altered it, combined it with what I had learned elsewhere, and now I was returning something to her.
Knowledge moved in a circle.
As I wrote at the time:
“It’s so beautiful how we all learn from each other, one hooper heart to the next.”
That sentence is covered in the earnestness of my early twenties, but I still believe what I was trying to say.
The practice did not belong to any one teacher, performer, or school. It passed between us. We learned through watching, imitating, experimenting, teaching, and being corrected. Every person carried the movement differently because every body was different. What one person offered was never reproduced perfectly; it was received, transformed, and passed onward.
By the time I attended Hoop Camp in California in 2008, that circulating exchange had become a culture of its own.
Hoop Camp Retreat 2008
For years, I had known many hoopers primarily through grainy online videos, usernames, festival sightings, and brief encounters on tour. (I can’t help but to hear “This one time…at Band Camp”, if you grew up in the early 2000s, you’ll get this. )
The people I had admired from across the country were suddenly gathered in one place. We practiced together during the day, exchanged ideas in workshops, ate together, laughed together, and filled the darkness with glowing hoops at night.
I was surrounded by women who had shaped my imagination before they ever knew my name, alongside childhood friends, college friends, troupe members, and the people who had become my chosen family on the road.
I described myself afterward as channeling “true Unicorn energy”—nonstop hooping, smiling, laughing, and learning. The language makes me laugh now, but the joy was real.
So was the sense that something larger than individual skill was taking place.
During the opening ceremony, we gathered around a prayer hoop and placed our intentions inside it. One by one, people spoke about what the hoop had done in their lives: the confidence it had restored, the friendships it had created, the grief it had carried, the joy it had unlocked, and the selves it had allowed them to discover.
In my blog afterward, I wrote:
“All of us have been changed by the hoop. It’s impacted our lives, brought us together, shown us ourselves, given us bliss, given us confidence…”
I would describe some of those experiences differently today. I no longer interpret every ecstatic weekend, meaningful coincidence, or intense connection through the same spiritual vocabulary I used then.
But I do not dismiss what happened simply because my language has changed.
We gathered around a shared practice.
We moved together.
We taught one another.
We placed hopes and prayers inside a circle.
And through repetition, rhythm, attention, and communal presence, many of us experienced real transformation.
What had begun as a cheap plastic toy had become a language through which we recognized one another.
A movement became a practice.
A practice became a community.
And somewhere along the way, community began to resemble ritual.
The Hunger We Keep Trying to Name
A movement became a practice.
A practice became a community.
And somewhere along the way, community began to resemble ritual.
I did not yet know the language of moral psychology or sociology. I had never heard Émile Durkheim’s phrase collective effervescence: the strange charge that can arise when people gather, move, sing, mourn, celebrate, and direct their attention toward something together.
I did not know Jonathan Haidt’s idea of the “hive switch”—the human capacity to loosen, temporarily, the boundaries of the individual self and become part of an emergent whole. Haidt has suggested that people sometimes need precisely these experiences of self-transcendence, and that music, dancing, communal worship, and local festivals can offer places where isolated individuals become participants in something larger.
I only knew what it felt like.
I knew the sensation of entering a field where hundreds of people were responding to the same rhythm. I knew what happened when musicians improvised, dancers answered, and the distance between performer and audience became briefly porous. I knew the feeling of looking across a dark campground and seeing circles of light moving through the trees.
I knew what it was to become less preoccupied with myself without disappearing entirely.
The experience was not one of erasing the individual. It was the experience of becoming an individual in relationship—one moving body inside a larger pattern.
Research on communal music and movement suggests that this feeling is not merely sentimental. Singing together can accelerate feelings of closeness among people who begin as strangers, while synchronized and physically demanding dance can deepen social bonding.
None of that proves that every festival is sacred, every crowd is healthy, or every ecstatic experience is transformative. Collective energy can be commercialized, manipulated, and turned toward destructive ends just as easily as generous ones. The same human capacity that allows people to lose themselves in music can also make groups tribal, conformist, or cruel.
But the possibility of misuse does not erase the underlying need.
We are creatures shaped for more than private thought.
We learn through imitation. We regulate one another through voice, expression, touch, and presence. We create attachment through repeated encounters. We remember through songs, meals, places, stories, gestures, and practices carried from one body into another.
And yet modern life increasingly offers us the image of these things without requiring our participation in them.
We can stream concerts without entering a crowd.
Watch other people dance without moving.
Order food without cooking or eating with anyone.
Read about ritual without belonging to a ritual community.
Listen to conversations about friendship while sitting alone.
Learn the vocabulary of embodiment while barely inhabiting our bodies.
We are connected to more people than previous generations could have imagined, yet much of that connection asks almost nothing of us beyond attention.
And attention is not the same as belonging.
Recognition is not reciprocity.
Watching is not participating.
A feed is not a feast.
The distinction matters because loneliness is not simply the absence of people. It can also be the absence of roles, obligations, shared places, repeated practices, and the experience of being meaningfully woven into other lives.
We have become very skilled at diagnosing the resulting ache.
We speak of trauma responses, dopamine, attachment styles, nervous-system dysregulation, depression, social anxiety, and burnout. These frameworks can be genuinely helpful. Naming an experience can make it less frightening and give us a place to begin.
But sometimes I wonder whether we are still trying to think our way out of conditions that cannot be changed through thought alone.
A widely shared passage attributed to Jay LeSoleil puts the mismatch much more sharply:
“You feel depressed and crazy because in every historical human culture known to anthropology, people sang together, danced together, and ate food together—and you don’t sing, you don’t dance, and you eat alone in the dark.
You are a singing ape, and you are meant to know fifty dances by heart, which hilltops are sacred, and the names of every plant it is possible to eat.”
The passage is deliberately sweeping. Depression cannot be reduced to a lack of communal dancing, and no single poetic statement can represent every historical culture.
But it lands because it names something our clinical language often misses.
The problem may not be only what is happening inside the isolated individual.
The problem may also be the world in which the individual is being asked to live.
A world where community has become optional, ritual has become content, food has become fuel, music has become background noise, and places are valued primarily for what can be extracted or built upon them.
A world in which we are encouraged to construct an identity but given fewer durable ways to belong.
Perhaps that is why our hunger attaches itself so easily to substitutes.
We mistake stimulation for aliveness.
Visibility for intimacy.
Agreement for community.
Intermittent attention for belonging.
We search for the feeling of being carried beyond ourselves through fandoms, online movements, romantic fixation, political tribes, spiritual consumerism, and endless streams of other people’s lives. Some of these can produce real relationships and genuine meaning. But they can also leave the body sitting in the same room, staring through the same glass, still longing to be somewhere it is needed.
When I look back now, I do not think I miss only the performances, the festivals, or the person I was at twenty-three.
I miss having a practice that placed me inside a living network of people, music, places, responsibilities, and shared memory.
I knew which songs could shift the energy of an entire field.
I knew who would help me carry my hoops.
I knew where people gathered after the music ended.
I had teachers, students, collaborators, and friends.
I had something to offer the gathering, and the gathering had something to ask of me.
That is different from being observed.
It is different from being liked.
It is different from being included in a group chat.
It is participation.
In 2014, I tried to describe this in a short poem:
Grateful for Dance
Portal to divine connection A form of sacred expression Of outward shining expansion Here I am, calling to attention
It’s time to move It’s time to be free It’s time to prove Your non-complacency
So please follow me Down this path of dance divinity It’s time we realize It’s not you and me, it’s we.
Some of the language makes me smile now. But that final line contains an intuition I still trust. It was never only about what happened to me inside the hoop.
It was about what became possible between us.
This does not mean we need to recreate the past, abandon technology, or spend our lives at music festivals. Nor does it mean every older community was nurturing. Communities can constrain, exclude, punish, and demand conformity. Nostalgia can make us forget that belonging has often come at a cost.
The question is not how to return to an imaginary golden age.
The question is what forms of participation human beings still need—and how we might create them honestly now.
Where can we sing without needing to be singers?
Dance without needing to perform?
Prepare food that will be eaten by more than one person?
Learn the names of the plants and animals around us?
Create rituals that give grief, gratitude, transition, and memory somewhere to live outside our private minds?
Practice something regularly enough that it changes us?
Modern people are drowning in information about how to become healthier, happier, more regulated, more spiritual, and more connected. But information cannot substitute for the meal, the chorus, the dance, the garden, the ceremony, the friendship, or the repeated practice.
Some wisdom can only be received through participation.
And perhaps some forms of loneliness cannot be solved by understanding ourselves more perfectly. Perhaps they require becoming part of something that does not begin and end with the self.
That is the ancient hunger beneath modern life.
Not merely the hunger to believe something.
The hunger to belong to a living world again.
And we may not be able to think our way back into that world.
What if strength training wasn’t simply about building muscle?
What if stepping beneath a barbell could become an act of devotion?
In this episode, I sit down with Awen of Primal Druidry, whose approach to physical training challenges many of our modern assumptions about both fitness and spirituality.
For her, the gym isn’t merely a place to improve health or appearance. It becomes sacred space—a place where discipline becomes ritual, physical hardship becomes offering, and strength training becomes a way of cultivating relationship with the divine.
Throughout our conversation, we explore questions like:
What is Primal Druidry, and what makes it a living tradition rather than an attempt to recreate the ancient past?
Why has strength training become such a central part of her spiritual practice?
What changes when exercise becomes ritual instead of self-improvement?
How does physical discipline shape character, devotion, and spiritual life?
What does she mean when she describes receiving guidance through training?
How do we think carefully about deeply personal spiritual experiences without dismissing them…or accepting them uncritically?
One aspect of our discussion that I found especially compelling is the challenge it poses to a very modern assumption: that the body is simply a vehicle for the mind. Throughout history, many religious and philosophical traditions have understood bodily practices (whether fasting, pilgrimage, martial arts, dance, or manual labor) as capable of shaping the soul.
This conversation asks whether lifting weights might belong in that lineage.
Even if you don’t share her theology or spiritual framework, I think the deeper questions are worth exploring.
Can repeated physical practice become a form of prayer?
Can discipline become devotion?
Can the body become a place where meaning is discovered rather than simply performed?
Those are the questions at the heart of this conversation.
As always, the goal isn’t to tell you what to believe. It’s to explore ideas with curiosity, ask better questions, and think more deeply about the relationship between body, mind, and the search for the sacred.
Thank you for taking the time to listen/watch, comment and share. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.
Hey Hey, Welcome back to Taste0ftruth Tuesdays. In today’s episode we are sitting down with Tina K. of The Rune Shack to explore runes, esotericism, and Norse-Germanic spirituality, alongside my own path through New Age spirituality, Christianity, and deconstruction.
For years, I was searching.
I wandered through wellness culture, festival communities, New Age spirituality, psychedelic conversations, evangelical Christianity, and eventually the long road of deconstruction. Every step taught me something. Every community offered language for experiences that often felt deeply meaningful.
But over time, I began to wonder:
How do we know when spirituality is making us more grounded—and when it is simply helping us escape reality?
Modern spirituality often promises awakening, healing, manifestation, higher consciousness, hidden knowledge, or secret wisdom. Sometimes those ideas genuinely encourage reflection and personal growth. Other times, they can become substitutes for the harder work of living honestly, accepting limits, grieving loss, cultivating discipline, and remaining accountable to reality and to other people.
This conversation isn’t a rejection of mystery. Far from it.
I believe human beings need myth, ritual, symbol, beauty, and experiences that remind us life is deeper than material reductionism alone can explain.
The challenge for me has been learning to distinguish between mystery and manipulation.
That distinction is one reason I wanted to invite Tina K. from The Rune Shack onto the podcast. Rather than centering on a single article, this conversation explores a broader landscape of ideas:
What is heathen spirituality?
What are runes beyond their popular image?
What does esotericism actually mean?
Why can spiritual authority become dangerous?
What makes New Age spirituality appealing and where can it become escapist?
Why do so many modern spiritual movements continue to reinterpret Jesus through ideas like the cosmic Christ or Christ consciousness?
And perhaps the deepest question of all:
What does real spirituality actually require?
I don’t approach these questions as someone who has everything figured out.
I ask them as someone who has lived inside several different spiritual worlds and has become increasingly interested in discernment rather than certainty.
My hope is to encourage more thoughtful questions about the stories we inherit, the authorities we trust, and the practices that shape our lives.
I hope you’ll join us for the conversation. Please let me know your thoughts.
Jesus, Scripture, and the Mythmaking Machinery of the Abrahamic World
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One of the most successful ideas in modern spirituality is the belief that Jesus represented a radical break from the religious world that produced him.
The problem is not merely that modern people have misunderstood Jesus. It is that the Gospel texts themselves are capable of generating multiple, even contradictory versions of him: compassionate teacher, apocalyptic judge, mystic, revolutionary, cosmic redeemer. That textual instability is one reason Christianity has proven so endlessly adaptable. Readers can extract the Jesus they want and then present that selection as the essence.
Whether presented as an enlightened teacher, a cosmic Christ, a universal sage, or simply a wise moral reformer, Jesus is often portrayed as transcending the tribalism, judgment, and exclusivity associated with the covenantal and apocalyptic world of the Hebrew scriptures. In popular imagination, he stands opposed to the harshness of the Old Testament: a teacher of love replacing a god of wrath, compassion overcoming law, and universal brotherhood replacing ancient tribal loyalties.
Later philosophical and spiritual movements took that elasticity and pushed it even further. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century currents such as Theosophy, New Thought, Western esotericism, and Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual reinterpretations recast Christ as a universal principle rather than a figure embedded in a specifically Jewish apocalyptic and covenantal world. “Christ” becomes less a messianic title rooted in Jewish expectation and more a symbol of inner divinity, cosmic consciousness, or spiritual evolution.
I reject that rescue attempt entirely. The modern “cosmic Christ” is not a recovery of some hidden essence. It is one more extraction from a set of texts already structurally open to reinterpretation. The same flexibility that allows one reader to find a gentle moral teacher allows another to find a figure of judgment, exclusion, and cosmic authority.
And that harsher figure is not hidden in some obscure corner of the tradition. Jesus speaks of judgment. He divides humanity into the saved and the condemned. He warns of outer darkness, weeping and gnashing of teeth, eternal punishment, and destruction for those who reject his message. Paul speaks of everlasting destruction. Revelation culminates in divine wrath, cosmic warfare, and the final defeat of God’s enemies.
This is not a departure from the older scriptural framework. It is its expansion.
What if the New Testament did not abandon the worldview of the Hebrew scriptures, but carried its deepest assumptions forward in universalized form?
That is the argument I want to follow here. The New Testament did not discard the basic structure of the Hebrew scriptures. It expanded it. Covenant became salvation history. Chosenness became a global saved-versus-condemned framework. Messianic expectation became cosmic kingship. Scripture became biography. On this reading, Christianity was not a liberation from the older framework, but its Gentile-facing sequel.
Representative examples of New Testament passages in which Jesus is portrayed not only as a moral teacher, but as a figure of exclusive authority, judgment, division, and ultimate rule.
Research from the Copenhagen School, along with scholars such as Russell Gmirkin, Jan Assmann, Yonatan Adler, and Thomas Thompson, has challenged assumptions many of us once took for granted. Their work points toward a far more dynamic process of literary construction, cultural memory, reinterpretation, and retrospective claims to antiquity behind the Hebrew scriptures. Some of that scholarship presses the issue further still, raising the unsettling possibility that Jesus himself may belong in the same larger scriptural problem-set as other biblical figures whose historicity has been asserted far more confidently than it has been demonstrated.
In previous episodes of my Jesus Myth series, I argued that the Gospels should not be treated as straightforward eyewitness biographies. Archaeology can illuminate the world of first-century Judea, but it does not confirm the Jesus of the Gospels. Paul’s letters give us a cosmic, scriptural Christ rather than a detailed memory of a recent Galilean teacher. The early Christian movement appears fragmented from the beginning, with competing visions of Christ long before later orthodoxy cleaned up the story.
This essay begins where that argument left off.
If the Gospels are not simple biography, then what are they? And if the Jesus figure is shaped so deeply by earlier scripture, then an even more unsettling question follows:
What kind of scripture was doing the shaping?
Because once we begin examining the New Testament closely, an extraordinary pattern emerges. The Jesus of the Gospels does not merely quote scripture. He is a product of it. The story begins to look less like the fulfillment of ancient history than the continuation of an ongoing literary tradition.
And if that scriptural world could generate covenant, chosenness, law, and sacred history, the possibility that it could also generate a messiah is no longer so easy to dismiss.
God giving the Tablets of the Law to Moses, from a manuscript attributed to Chrétien Legouais, 1325 CE. Image source: gallica.bnf.fr / Bibliothèque municipal de Rouen.
Not Influence but Scaffolding
The claim that the Gospel writers drew from Jewish scripture is not controversial. Virtually every New Testament scholar acknowledges that the evangelists quoted, interpreted, and reworked earlier biblical texts. The real question is what kind of borrowing we are dealing with.
Some modern writers argue that the Gospels are fundamentally Greek in character, shaped by Hellenistic literary conventions such as heroic archetypes, divine signs, dramatic climaxes, and narrative form recognizable to a Greek-speaking audience. There is truth in that observation. The Gospels were written in Greek, circulated in a Hellenistic world, and emerged from a culture saturated with literary adaptation and symbolic storytelling. But that framing can miss something more concrete. The density of engagement with Jewish scripture in the Gospels is not merely thematic or stylistic. It is textual, structural, and relentless.
Dozens of explicit citations appear across the texts. Beneath them lies a much larger web of allusions, echoes, narrative patterns, and character templates drawn from the Hebrew Bible. Counted conservatively, these parallels number in the dozens. Traced more fully, they run into the hundreds. Entire scenes are shaped by earlier passages. Entire narrative arcs follow scriptural precedent. By comparison, proposed parallels to Greek myth or pagan figures are usually broader, more conceptual, and far less anchored in specific texts. My aim is not to deny Greco-Roman influence, but to put it in proportion. The Gospels may speak Greek, but they think in Hebrew scripture.
This framing is not idiosyncratic; volumes such as Is This Not the Carpenter? place the question of Jesus’ historicity alongside Paul, intertextuality, and the “rewritten Bible,” showing how difficult it is to separate later “biography” from scriptural rewriting and theological construction.
One example of that scriptural-political matrix appears in the star and scepter imagery attached to messianic expectation.
Star, Scepter, and Political Theology
Long before Christianity, certain biblical oracles had already been charged with political and eschatological force. Numbers 24:17, “a star shall come out of Jacob, a scepter shall rise out of Israel,” was read in the Dead Sea Scrolls as prophecy of a coming Davidic ruler. Matthew places a star over Bethlehem. Revelation has Jesus call himself the bright Morning Star. This imagery stood at the crossroads of Jewish expectation and the wider symbolic world of antiquity, where heavenly signs marked kingship, divine favor, and world-changing rule. Early Christians did not invent that language. They seized it and redirected it toward Jesus.
Matthew tells us that the holy family’s return from Egypt fulfills Hosea’s words, “Out of Egypt I called my son.” In its original context, Hosea was speaking about Israel, not a future messiah. The passage is not simply cited. It is repurposed. And that pattern repeats across the Gospels.
The crucifixion sharpens the problem because it is often treated as the most historically secure element of the Gospel tradition. Yet when we look closely, the scene does not read like a bare report of an execution. It reads like a carefully arranged scriptural drama. Psalm 22 is especially central. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” appears in the Gospels as Jesus’ cry from the cross. The mocked sufferer, the taunts of the crowd, and the casting of lots for garments all appear in the passion narrative. Isaiah 53 adds the rejected and afflicted servant who is silent before his accusers and numbered among transgressors. Psalm 69 contributes the sour wine. Zechariah supplies the struck shepherd and pierced figure. Even the Wisdom of Solomon describes a righteous man mocked for calling God his father and condemned to a shameful death. Taken one by one, these parallels can be treated as interpretation. Taken together, they stop looking incidental and start looking compositional.
At minimum, the evangelists are constructing the meaning of Jesus’ death through inherited texts. At maximum, some of the scene’s most memorable details may have been generated by those texts.
The same dynamic extends beyond individual scenes into the wider narrative structure. Joseph is betrayed by his brothers, sold for silver, stripped, cast into a pit, and later exalted. Jesus is betrayed by Judas, sold for silver, stripped, entombed, and exalted. Jonah spends three days in the belly of the fish; Jesus predicts three days in the heart of the earth. Moses escapes a ruler bent on killing Hebrew infants, emerges from exile, ascends a mountain, and mediates a covenant. Jesus follows the same symbolic arc: threatened by a murderous ruler, called out of Egypt, tested in the wilderness, teaching from a mountain, and inaugurating a renewed covenant. This is not random resemblance. It reflects a world in which earlier stories functioned as templates.
Ancient Jewish authors did not treat scripture as a static archive of facts. They treated it as a living body of tradition that could be revisited, reinterpreted, and applied to new circumstances.
One key technique is typology recognized recurring patterns across time: Moses could become a template for a future deliverer, and Israel’s exile could foreshadow restoration. Midrash explored hidden meanings, tensions, and new applications within older texts. Pesher, attested in the Dead Sea Scrolls, treated scripture as containing encoded meanings that spoke directly to the interpreter’s own time.
By the time we arrive at early Christianity, scripture is no longer functioning merely as a record of the past. It is functioning as a codebook. The first Christians did not read the Hebrew scriptures as neutral background material for a life that had already happened. They searched them for hidden patterns, veiled prophecies, typological correspondences, and Spirit-guided meanings. A passage did not have to be about Jesus in its original context in order to become about Jesus through inspired interpretation. Israel could become Jesus. The suffering righteous man could become Jesus. The rejected servant could become Jesus. A sign given to an ancient king could become Jesus. The text became a map, and Christ was the figure readers were trained to find within it.
That is crucial because it shows how scripture was actually being used. Early Jewish readers were not passively receiving texts as fixed records of the past. They were searching them, recombining them, and uncovering patterns that could be applied to their own historical moment. As Richard Carrier and others have noted, this kind of scriptural decoding was not marginal. It was widespread. The New Testament writers emerged directly out of this world. They were Jews steeped in a tradition where scripture was not treated as a flat archive of past events, but as a living body of meaning to be searched, reread, and reapplied. When early Christians portrayed Jesus, they were not simply recording a life in the modern biographical sense. They were rereading the Hebrew scriptures to interpret his life, death, mission, and cosmic significance. That is why so much of the Gospel narrative appears to fulfill older texts. The authors were not recording events and then attaching verses afterward. They were crafting a theological portrait through inherited techniques of scriptural interpretation.
This is visible even in the words attributed to Jesus. What later readers encounter as the “red-letter” sayings are not free-floating teachings dropped into history untouched by tradition. They are deeply embedded in a scriptural world. When asked about the greatest commandment, Jesus answers by quoting Deuteronomy 6 and Leviticus 19. His warning that “the stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone” comes from Psalm 118. Even his cry from the cross is lifted from Psalm 22. He does not stand outside the tradition commenting on it from a distance. He speaks from within it.
Once the literary architecture of the Gospels becomes visible, a more difficult question comes into focus. Are the evangelists taking a real remembered life and interpreting it through scripture, or are they using scripture itself to shape the narrative they present? Those are not small variations of the same idea. They are rival explanations. One begins with a historical figure and treats scriptural patterning as interpretation. The other begins with a scriptural tradition and understands the figure as emerging from it. The more densely these patterns appear, the harder it becomes to maintain a clear boundary between the person being described and the literary tradition doing the describing.
The Foundation Is Younger Than It Appears
Most readers imagine the Hebrew scriptures as ancient deposits of sacred memory stretching deep into the past. Moses belongs to remote antiquity. The prophets stand centuries before Jesus. The New Testament then appears as the culmination of an immense and venerable arc.
But that inherited picture is much shakier than people like to admit.
Biblical minimalists associated with the Copenhagen School, including Thomas L. Thompson, Niels Peter Lemche, and Philip Davies, challenged the assumption that the Hebrew Bible gives us transparent access to early Israelite history. Their argument was not that nothing existed before the texts, but that the biblical story of Israel may be less a record of national origins than a later literary construction of those origins.
Elephantine Temple reconstruction petition, 5th century BCE. The Elephantine papyri preserve evidence of a Jewish/Judean military community in southern Egypt that worshiped Yahweh and maintained a temple outside Jerusalem — a striking challenge to the assumption that Torah-centered Judaism was already universally organized around Jerusalem by this period.
The Elephantine Problem
The Elephantine papyri make that problem hard to ignore. In the fifth century BCE, a Jewish/Judean military community in southern Egypt worshiped Yahweh, maintained its own temple, practiced sacrifice, and remained in contact with Jerusalem. Yet this community does not clearly reflect the fully formed Torah-centered Judaism later projected backward into Israel’s past. There is no obvious evidence of an exclusive Jerusalem cult, a centralized Pentateuchal legal order, or the religious system later treated as ancient and universal. That does not prove no Pentateuchal traditions existed in any form, but it does make the traditional timeline look far less secure.
Archaeology adds more pressure. The patriarchal age, the Exodus, the conquest, and the grandeur of the united monarchy have all been heavily challenged. Egyptian records do not confirm the biblical Exodus. Archaeology has not vindicated the conquest of Jericho in the form the Bible presents it. Even early Israelite religion appears messier than later monotheistic memory allows, with inscriptions invoking Yahweh alongside Asherah. The issue is not merely that the Bible contains embellishment. The issue is that some of its foundational stories may be retrospective national myths written as ancient history.
Plato, Moses, and the Making of Sacred Antiquity
This is where Russell Gmirkin pushes the argument further. He argues that the Pentateuch reached final form around 273–272 BCE, in the Alexandrian and Ptolemaic world of the third century BCE, close to the Septuagint project and the intellectual culture of the Great Library. On this model, the Torah was not merely translated into Greek at Alexandria. It may have been composed or finalized there.
Gmirkin’s argument is controversial, but it is not random. He points to literary dependence: Genesis 1–11 drawing on Berossus’ Babylonian history, Exodus engaging Manetho’s Egyptian history, and the Torah’s legal materials reflecting Greek, especially Platonic, models of law, constitution, and national foundation. Philippe Wajdenbaum develops a similar comparison, arguing that the Hebrew Bible resembles Greek literature, especially Plato’s Laws, in its construction of a people around a lawgiver, sacred land, twelve tribes, and a divinely authorized legal order.
This changes the way Moses looks. In Gmirkin’s reading, Moses is not simply a prophet. He resembles an oikist, a founder figure: the one who organizes a people, distributes land, establishes institutions, and anchors political order in a sacred origin story. The Torah, in turn, begins to look less like a loose bundle of ancient laws and more like a charter myth. It tells a people who they are, where they came from, why their laws are sacred, and why obedience to that order is obedience to God.
That is where the real trick lies. Once law is placed in the mouth of Moses and projected backward into sacred antiquity, it stops looking like legislation and begins to look like revelation.
This also helps explain later apologetic reversals. By the time we reach writers such as Philo and Josephus, the direction of influence has been flipped. Greek thinkers are now said to have borrowed from Moses, not the other way around. The issue was never merely content. It was priority. The Bible’s authority depended not only on what it said, but on when people believed it had been said. The Letter of Aristeas belongs to the same machinery of sacred self-presentation: Jewish antiquity staged for the Greek world as though ancient wisdom were simply being translated, rather than emerging from a competitive Hellenistic culture of literary production and historical self-invention.
Yonatan Adler adds one final complication. The question is not only when these texts were written, but when they became socially real. Adler argues that widespread Torah observance becomes clearly visible much later than tradition claims, especially in the Hasmonean period. A text can exist before it rules. A law can be written before it governs a people.
The implications of that compressed timeline are enormous.
The implications are enormous. If the Pentateuch reached final form around 273–272 BCE, and the Gospels were written between roughly 70 and 100 CE, then the scriptures supposedly being “fulfilled” by the Gospel writers may be only three or four centuries older than the Gospels themselves.
That does not make the connection less Jewish. It makes it look less like the unfolding of immemorial revelation and more like literary tradition building on literary tradition.
And once that compressed timeline is taken seriously, the next question is no longer simply how old the tradition was supposed to be. It is how sacred antiquity itself was made.
The Library of Alexandria in Egypt: the intellectual crossroads of the Hellenistic world, where texts were collected, translated, and rewritten. Building on comparative studies and source criticism, Russell Gmirkin argues that the Pentateuch may have taken shape in this environment in the third century BCE, drawing on Greek histories, legal traditions, and philosophical works.
From Failed Kingdom to Spiritual Messiah
This is the missing hinge. Jewish messianic hope did not arise in a vacuum. It was forged in the long shadow of conquest, exile, humiliation, and imperial domination. From Assyria and Babylon to the Greeks and Romans, Jewish life was repeatedly shaped by foreign rule. It is not difficult to see why restoration, divine justice, and the dream of an anointed deliverer became so central. A people under pressure will search its own sacred memory for the pattern of rescue.
By the first century, that hope had become unstable. Second Temple Judaism was not a unified religion serenely awaiting fulfillment. It was a fractured landscape of rival sects, competing scriptural interpretations, anti-Temple resentment, apocalyptic expectation, and bitter disagreement about where Israel had gone wrong. Some blamed foreign occupation on sin. Some blamed corrupt elites. Some rejected the legitimacy of the Temple leadership altogether. In that environment, scripture was not merely read. It was mined for survival strategies.
This is where Carrier’s point becomes useful. As he writes, “The traditional messianic hope (of a conclusive military victory over all of Israel’s neighbors) was a doomed hope, and that would have been obvious to at least some Jews.” A warrior-king who would visibly crush Rome was precisely the kind of messiah history kept refusing to produce. A spiritual messiah, by contrast, could not be falsified so easily. He could conquer Satan rather than Caesar, the heavens rather than the earth, sin rather than empire. Defeat could be reinterpreted as hidden victory. Political disappointment could be absorbed into myth.
That shift matters. A suffering, dying, or heavenly messiah fits prolonged subjugation far better than a triumphant Davidic conqueror who never arrives. Christianity did not solve the Roman problem by overthrowing Rome. It solved it by changing the terms of victory. The kingdom became “not of this world.” The struggle moved from flesh and blood to cosmic powers. The messiah no longer needed to raise an army from Jerusalem if he could instead be enthroned in heaven.
And that made Christianity exportable. The movement that emerged did not require Gentiles to become Jews in the full covenantal sense. It offered a way for Gentiles to worship the God of Israel without circumcision, kosher law, or full Torah observance. Acts 15 is the obvious flashpoint. The Jerusalem leadership approves Gentile inclusion through a reduced set of obligations, allowing the biblical framework to expand beyond ethnic Judaism without dissolving its theological core. The God remains the God of Israel. The scriptures remain Jewish scriptures. The messiah remains the Jewish messiah. What changes is access.
That is one of the most important transformations in religious history. Christianity became, in effect, Judaism for Gentiles: a way of universalizing Israel’s God, Israel’s scriptures, Israel’s messianic story, and Israel’s eschatological framework without requiring the nations to become Jews. The old covenantal architecture was not abandoned. It was scaled.
And once that is clear, the next question presses harder than ever. If this new messiah emerged from scriptural reinterpretation, apocalyptic disappointment, sectarian fragmentation, and theological adaptation to empire, then the issue is no longer merely what early Christians believed about him.
It is whether there was ever a stable historical figure there in the first place.
The Last Firewall: “But Surely Jesus Was Historical”
By this point in the argument, a familiar fallback usually appears. The miracles may be myth. The resurrection may be theology. The birth stories may be literary invention. The passion narrative may be scriptural construction. The speeches may be later compositions. The chronology may be artificial. Fine. Grant all that, people say. But surely there was still a man underneath it all.
I no longer accept that assumption, and I do not think it deserves to be treated as intellectually safe merely because it is familiar.
Once literary and theological construction has been conceded at nearly every level of the tradition, the so-called “historical Jesus” begins to look less like a demonstrated figure than like a residue, a placeholder left standing after everything obviously mythic has been stripped away. The problem is not that a historical core has been disproved in some crude, absolute sense. The problem is that it is constantly assumed, while the evidence for it remains astonishingly thin.
Where, exactly, is this man supposed to be found?
There is no contemporary, independent, non-Christian evidence for Jesus as a historical person. There is no inscription, no administrative record, no eyewitness account, no Roman report from his lifetime, no Jewish source from his lifetime, no archaeological evidence identifying him, no surviving text from anyone who actually met him. What we possess are Christian theological writings.
And our earliest source, Paul, does not give us a remembered Galilean teacher wandering around first-century Judea. He gives us a revealed, cosmic, scriptural Christ known through visions, revelation, scripture, death, resurrection, and heavenly significance. Paul does not preserve a stable earthly biography. He does not narrate Bethlehem, Nazareth, Galilee, Judas, Mary Magdalene at the tomb, Pilate’s trial scene, or the sermon material that later becomes central to the Gospel portrait. That absence is not a trivial inconvenience. It is a structural problem.
Even 2 Peter is revealing on this point. “For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.” The denial is telling. It does not prove invention by itself, but it does show that early Christian claims could be heard as mythic, visionary, or constructed. And the response is instructive. The author does not answer by providing a grounded earthly biography. He answers with prophecy, revelation, glory, and Spirit-soaked authority.
The Gospels themselves do not rescue the situation. They are anonymous literary-theological compositions written decades after the alleged events, in Greek, through dense scriptural patterning. They do not read like independent eyewitness memory. They read like sacred narrative built from older texts, typology, apocalyptic expectation, and theological necessity.
The supposed external witnesses do not solve the problem. Josephus is late, textually disputed, and preserved through Christian transmission. Tacitus is later still and tells us, at most, what Christians in his own time believed about their origins. These are not contemporary confirmations of Jesus’ life. They are later references to a movement that already existed. They tell us Christianity happened. They do not securely tell us that the Gospel figure at its center was historical in the way readers are encouraged to imagine.
The same goes for the phrases in Paul that are endlessly hauled out as if they settle the matter. “Born of a woman,” “seed of David,” “brother of the Lord” — these are not granite biographical anchors. They can function as incarnation language, messianic credentialing, or intra-community title. They do not give us a recoverable historical Jesus standing solidly behind the later narratives. They give us phrases. The heavy lifting is done by prior belief.
This is why I reject the polite compromise that says, “Of course the Gospel Jesus is mythologized, but there must have been a real preacher behind him.” Must there? Why? Because modern scholars feel more respectable keeping one sandal planted on the ground? Because the imagination panics at the thought that the whole figure may be literary from the start? Because once the miracles, fulfillment scenes, speeches, chronology, passion details, and resurrection appearances are recognized as constructed, people still want one final reassuring object left?
To me, this often functions less like an argument than a psychological reflex.
And this is precisely where Gmirkin’s work ceases to be merely interesting and becomes a consistency test.
If we are willing to follow biblical minimalism when it exposes the Pentateuch as a late literary-theological construction, why should the inquiry suddenly stop at Christianity? If the Hebrew scriptures can be composed, adapted, borrowed, and projected backward into sacred antiquity, why is Jesus protected from the same analysis? Why is the critique allowed to dismantle Moses, law, covenant, and national memory, only to halt politely at the Messiah as if some invisible velvet rope had been lowered around him?
That exemption makes no sense.
Christianity does not escape the biblical matrix. It depends on it. It preserves the God of Israel, the prophets, the covenants, the messianic framework, the chosen-people logic, and the eschatological expectation that history moves toward divine judgment and final rule. Its dispute with Judaism is not over the structure. It is over who gets to occupy the central role within it. Christianity is not the grand liberation from the older framework that its admirers like to imagine. It is the sequel.
And once that is admitted, the next step is not radical at all. It is obvious.
If scripture can generate Moses, covenant, law, land, chosenness, and sacred national memory, then scripture can also generate Jesus, fulfillment, cross, resurrection, judgment, and cosmic kingship. If a literary-theological tradition can manufacture sacred antiquity, why should it suddenly lose that power when it reaches the first century? If the old stories can produce a founder, a people, a law, and a history, why should they not also produce a messiah?
Christianity does not begin, in our earliest sources, with a stable man later decorated with myth. It begins with a revealed Christ known through scripture and visions. The earthly biography comes later, and when it appears, it arrives already saturated with literary design.
If that is true, then the task is no longer to keep exhausting ink and paper trying to peel a “real Jesus” out of layers of literary construction. The more urgent question becomes: what were the earliest apostles, visionaries, and authors actually doing? What experiences did they think they were having? What apocalyptic expectations drove them? What rhetorical and mythical work were the later stories performing? Once the data about Jesus comes to us primarily through scripture, revelation, and literary invention rather than recent biography, the center of gravity shifts. The real subject is no longer a recoverable Galilean teacher hiding behind the text, but the motives, methods, and imaginative world of the people who produced the text.
The Gospel Jesus is not history remembered and then embellished. He is scripture personified, given narrative form, furnished with a recent setting, and made to walk through a world already prepared for him by text. At that point, Christianity begins to look less like a movement built around a misremembered man and more like a movement built around visionary claims, apocalyptic expectation, scriptural decoding, and later literary elaboration. What demands explanation is not how a historical teacher was gradually mythologized, but how a mythic and scriptural Christ was gradually narrativized.
That is the last firewall. Once readers are willing to concede literary construction everywhere else, Jesus becomes the one figure they are still expected to protect. Not because the evidence suddenly improves, but because the emotional and institutional cost of following the argument any further becomes too high. And if that protection finally collapses, then a great deal of Jesus studies will have to admit that it has been spending enormous effort on the wrong pursuit. The real work would no longer be reconstructing a man behind the myths, but reconstructing the interpretive practices, sectarian motives, visionary experiences, and literary intentions that produced the myth in the first place.
And that is exactly where Jan Assmann becomes useful.
The resistance here is not just intellectual. It is civilizational. By the time people reach Jesus, they are no longer defending one ancient figure among others. They are defending a memory-world: a moral vocabulary, a theory of suffering, a structure of hope, a story about history, and often the emotional architecture through which they understand themselves. That is why the argument suddenly feels so charged. It is no longer just about evidence. It is about what happens when literature hardens into memory and memory hardens into reality.
Mnemohistory: When Literature Becomes Memory
“Mnemohistory,” a term coined by Jan Assmann, refers not simply to the past, but to the way societies remember the past. That sounds academic. In practice, it is far more destabilizing than it first appears.
I was first introduced to Assmann’s work through my friend Brado, and once the idea clicked, a great deal of human behavior stopped looking mysterious. One of the hardest things to swallow is realizing how much of what people confidently call “history” is not history in the plain sense at all, but mnemohistory: emotionally charged civilizational storytelling repeated so often that it hardens into something psychologically untouchable.
A society does not merely pass down facts. It passes down stories about origins, suffering, enemies, rescue, chosenness, betrayal, exile, return, and destiny. Those stories do not simply describe the past. They train perception. They teach people what to love, what to fear, whom to trust, whom to blame, and what future to desire. After a while, people are no longer defending a memory. They are defending the world that memory built for them.
That is why historical arguments go feral so quickly. You are never just disputing an event. You are touching the memory structure through which a group recognizes itself. The Exodus is one of the clearest examples. It is not merely a story to be remembered, but a story about remembering: bondage, liberation, divine rescue, covenant, promised land. It turns memory into identity and identity into destiny. The past is ritualized so that it can keep governing the present.
This is also where Neil Van Leeuwen’s distinction between factual belief and religious credence becomes clarifying. A factual belief is supposed to track reality across contexts. Religious credence works differently. It behaves less like stable fact-tracking and more like an imaginative, identity-bound commitment activated in specific social and ritual settings. A church can gather in a gymnasium and everyone still knows they are sitting on bleachers under fluorescent lights. Yet within that setting, the space becomes sacred. The credence does not erase ordinary reality. It overlays it and reorganizes meaning.
That helps explain why apologetics so often feels impervious to evidence. It is not primarily a truth-seeking enterprise, but a credence-maintenance system. Doubt is framed as danger, questions are met with prefabricated responses, and rituals, narratives, and authorities work together to protect identity rather than expose it to risk. As Van Leeuwen argues, when an attitude is rooted in group identity, truth can easily take a back seat.
Once you see that, a great deal of Christian apologetics becomes easier to understand. Its stubbornness is not a bug. It is the design. It is not really trying to investigate whether the historical Jesus can bear the weight placed on him. It is trying to prevent the collapse of the cognitive and social world built around him.
That is why arguments about Jesus’ historicity so often feel like Groundhog Day. One side keeps asking what the evidence can actually support. The other keeps reasserting the figure as though familiarity itself were proof. By the time people reach Jesus, they are no longer just defending one ancient claim among others. They are defending a moral universe, a structure of consolation, a theory of suffering, a promise of justice, a spiritual identity, and often an entire social world.
This is how Christianity became one of history’s most successful Trojan horses. It entered the Roman world clothed in humility, forgiveness, self-denial, and the sanctification of suffering. But that moral vocabulary was tailor-made for rule. A religion that teaches obedience, glorifies submission, and casts suffering as meaningful does not merely coexist with empire. It serves it. Constantine did not have to distort Christianity into something authoritarian. Its authoritarian potential was already there, waiting to be scaled.
The reason this matters is not that ancient people wrote sacred stories. Humans have always done that. The reason it matters is that some sacred stories do not stay on the page. They become political grammar. They teach civilizations how to imagine enemies, destiny, land, obedience, suffering, and war.
Modern Consequences: When Sacred Story Becomes Political Machinery
And this is where the conversation is no longer academic or safely trapped in antiquity.
In the modern West, and especially in the United States, support for Israel is often presented not merely as a strategic choice but as a moral and even spiritual duty. For millions of Christians, conflict in the Middle East is not simply geopolitics. It is part of a sacred script. Apocalyptic language has not remained tucked away in pulpits and prophecy conferences. It has drifted upward into policy, media, lobbying, diplomacy, and war.
And the problem is larger than American evangelicalism.
What is now sold as “Judeo-Christian friendship” increasingly functions as a transnational political package. Israel is marketed not simply as a nation-state but as a symbol of “the West,” biblical truth, anti-communism, anti-Islamism, anti-woke moral order, technological modernity, and civilizational resolve. That is why gatherings such as the JNS International Policy Summit in Jerusalem and the Judeo-Christian Zionist Congress matter. They are not quaint interfaith exercises. They are strategy rooms in which theology, media, diplomacy, philanthropy, and security discourse are braided together and sent back out as political messaging.
Latin America makes the pattern especially visible. As evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity grows as a political force, Israel is increasingly recoded as a sacred-political emblem of order, family values, anti-left resistance, and biblical destiny. The Isaac Accords are a perfect example. They are presented in the language of democratic values, innovation, security, and cooperation, but the emotional engine underneath them is older and hotter than that. Israel becomes a proof-text. Foreign policy becomes catechism by other means. The old Abrahamic machinery has simply evolved to speak the language of diplomacy, branding, and strategic partnership.
This is why the usual dismissals fail. We are not dealing with private religious sentiment lingering harmlessly at the margins. We are dealing with inherited apocalyptic structures that shape how nations imagine enemies, allies, legitimacy, time, and destiny. When political leaders, religious institutions, military personnel, media ecosystems, and ordinary citizens inherit stories about Israel, Iran, final battles, messiahs, Armageddon, and divine destiny, the line between prophecy and policy begins to blur. Conflict stops looking contingent. It starts looking prewritten.
The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit coined the term hyperstition for ideas that bring themselves into existence because people believe them strongly enough to act on them. That concept belongs here. A prophecy does not have to be true to become dangerous. It only has to recruit enough believers willing to organize behavior around it. Once that happens, old stories stop functioning as symbolic expectation and begin operating as strategic motivation.
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all carry end-times narratives organized around the same theological lore: messianic figures, final conflict, cosmic judgment, and the Middle East.
A revealing example appears in the Qur’an’s treatment of Jesus. In Surah 3:45, Jesus is called al-Masīḥ — the Messiah. Islam does not use that title in the Christian sense: Jesus is not divine, not the Son of God, and not a crucified savior. But the messianic category remains.
The traditions are not identical, and their details often conflict sharply. But they share enough inherited narrative architecture to be significant here.
Maimonides makes the continuity unusually explicit, and his wording matters because he was no fringe oddball. He was one of the most important Jewish legal and philosophical authorities in history. In Mishneh Torah, Laws of Kings 11:4, frames Jesus and Muhammad as figures who, within divine providence, helped spread knowledge of messianic expectation and the God of Israel among the nations.
That is the blueprint: a shared body of theological lore, a transmitted narrative architecture that persists even as details are revised. Its logic is self-reinforcing. Prophecy validates scripture, scripture is reread as fulfilled prophecy, and each new crisis is folded back into the old frame as confirmation. The game works not because the texts reliably predict history, but because they are endlessly reinterpreted, retrofitted, and made to certify one another.
And that is why literary origins matter. If sacred histories are constructed, revised, projected backward, and then defended as untouchable truth, they do not remain harmless. They shape borders, justify wars, license alliances, sanctify violence, and train populations to see obedience as virtue and confrontation as destiny. The danger is not simply that people believe old stories. The danger is that these stories still command institutions, budgets, media systems, electorates, intelligence networks, and weapons.
Entire populations become characters in someone else’s sacred drama. Human beings become pieces on an apocalyptic chessboard. War ceases to be merely war. It becomes fulfillment.
Voltaire’s warning still bites: those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
This is why I do what I do with such fierce passion. I believe the Abrahamic traditions are built on layers of fabrication, borrowed myths, retroactive claims to antiquity, and sacred stories whose origins are rarely examined with the seriousness they deserve. To me, it is an insult to wisdom, curiosity, and the pursuit of knowledge that so much of our culture remains shaped by narratives that are historically unstable, morally suspect, and fiercely defended as untouchable truth.
Questioning these stories is not hatred. It is not divisive. It is intellectual self-defense. It is spiritual self-defense. It is the work of reclaiming the human mind from inherited scripts that have too often taught people to sanctify obedience, suffering, conquest, and fear.
If sacred stories can shape civilizations, then examining them is not a niche academic exercise. It is necessary work.
Resources and Further Reading
Laurent Guyénot — “Russell Gmirkin and the Biblical Con” (Substack series) Jan Assmann: Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism Jan Assmann: Cultural Memory and Early Civilization Richard B. Hays: Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels Dale C. Allison Jr.: The New Moses: A Matthean Typology E.P. Sanders: The Historical Figure of Jesus Geza Vermes: Jesus the Jew Bart D. Ehrman: Did Jesus Exist? Yonatan Adler: The Origins of Judaism: An Archaeological-Historical Reappraisal Russell Gmirkin: Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus Russell Gmirkin: Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible Philippe Wajdenbaum: Argonauts of the Desert Thomas L. Thompson: The Mythic Past Philip R. Davies: In Search of “Ancient Israel” Ze’ev Herzog: “Deconstructing the Walls of Jericho” (Haaretz, 1999) David Skrbina: The Jesus Hoax Richard Carrier: On the Historicity of Jesus, The Obsolete Paradigm of a Historical Jesus Thomas L. Thompson and Thomas S. Verenna, eds., Is This Not the Carpenter? The Question of the Historicity of the Figure of Jesus
When Plato Returned, Religious Authority, and the Birth of Freedom of Conscience
This week I sat down with fellow Virginian Collin Conkwright of American Esoteric to discuss a topic that has deeply fascinated me: the pagan, Platonic, and esoteric currents that helped shape the Italian Renaissance.
Most of us inherit a fairly simple story. Christianity triumphs, paganism fades away, and the Renaissance eventually arrives as an artistic and cultural flowering. But history is rarely that neat.
One reason these questions interest me is because of Jan Assmann’s idea of the “Mosaic Distinction.” You’ll hear me mention this concept several times throughout the interview, so I wanted to offer more clarification here.
In simple terms, Assmann argued that many ancient religions could accommodate multiple gods, cults, and local traditions, while the Jewish Torah tradition introduced a much sharper distinction between true religion and false religion, orthodoxy and error. A topic we discuss often here, is what happens when competing worldviews are no longer seen as different paths, but as rivals in a struggle over truth itself? That tension sits quietly beneath much of what we discussed in this episode.
Our conversation centered on figures like Gemistos Plethon, the Byzantine scholar who helped reintroduce Plato to Renaissance Italy, and the remarkable recovery of ancient philosophical traditions that many assumed had long vanished. We discussed everything from Neoplatonism and intermediary spiritual beings to the preservation, destruction, and transmission of ancient texts.
One of the themes that kept resurfacing was memory. How much of the ancient world actually survived? How much was lost? And how much of what survives comes to us through institutions that may have opposed the very ideas they were preserving?
The destruction of Plethon’s Book of Laws became a particularly fascinating example. It raises a question I’ve found myself returning to often: when we’re trying to understand antiquity, are we seeing the ancient world itself, or are we seeing the ancient world through the lens of those who copied, edited, condemned, and preserved it?
A fresco in Anagni Cathedral C.1250, illustrating the theme of Plato’s Timaeus. At the centre of the universe, the macrocosm, is a human figure, the microcosm. The surrounding circles represent the ages of man, the seasons and the four humours.
We also explored the strange relationship between Christianity and Greek philosophy. The Renaissance recovery of Plato wasn’t entirely foreign to Christian thought. Figures like Philo of Alexandria had already fused Jewish and Platonic ideas centuries before the formal development of Christian theology. In many ways, the Renaissance reopened conversations that had never fully gone away.
This is where the story becomes especially interesting to me.
The Logos language that became so central to Christianity did not emerge from nowhere. It moved through Hellenistic Judaism, and through a world already shaped by Greek philosophical categories.
For me, the broader pattern is difficult to ignore, Christianity positioned itself as transcending both Judaism and paganism while carrying important elements of both within its own intellectual framework. The irony is striking, dontcha think? The later Christian West often came to fear the return of pagan philosophy, even though portions of its own theological architecture had been built from those exact materials centuries earlier.
The Triumph of Christianity Over Paganism, by Tommaso Laureti 1585
As Laurent Guyénot puts it, perhaps too sharply for some readers, this represented
“a turning point in Western intellectual history—a Jewish coup on the Gentile mind.”
Hermes Trismegistus passing ancient wisdom to the Greeks and Egyptians. Renaissance thinkers increasingly believed that forgotten truths could be recovered through philosophy, mysticism, and ancient texts.
One unexpected moment in the conversation led to a friendly scholarly disagreement between Collin and me. We began discussing Christianity’s relationship to power and empire, and whether the alliance between Christianity and imperial authority represented a corruption of the original movement or something more deeply rooted in the tradition itself.
Collin suggested that he couldn’t imagine Jesus signing off on the imperial structures that later developed around Christianity. My immediate reaction was that I’m not entirely convinced the divide is that clean. The language of kingship, authority, judgment, obedience, dominion, and universal truth claims seems deeply embedded within both the Old and New Testaments. For me, the harder question is not whether Christianity became attached to power, but whether some of those impulses were already present from the beginning.
We didn’t solve that debate, and honestly I’m glad we didn’t.
It’s one of those conversations where reasonable people can look at the same texts and arrive at very different conclusions. I’d be curious to hear where listeners land on that question after hearing the episode.
One reason I loved Collin’s video on Thomas Jefferson and Virginia’s fight for religious freedom is because it reminds us that Americans were not merely inheriting a tidy Christian political order. They were actively trying to disentangle state power from enforced religious authority.
The “Christian nation” narrative becomes much harder to sustain once you start looking at Enlightenment thought, classical influence, religious pluralism, and Virginia’s own struggle over conscience. Early American liberty imagery drew heavily from Greece and Rome while existing within a broadly Christian culture. The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom and Madison’s arguments against religious assessments did not emerge from nowhere. They emerged from centuries of debate over authority, conscience, philosophy, and the proper relationship between religion and the state.
In many ways, that’s what makes the Renaissance relevant to this conversation.
The recovery of ancient philosophy helped reopen intellectual space. Competing traditions could once again be examined. Older assumptions could be questioned. The monopoly of a single inherited worldview became increasingly difficult to maintain.
Raphael’s School of Athens places Plato and Aristotle at the center of the ancient intellectual world. Plato points upward toward transcendent realities, eternal forms, and truths beyond the material world, while Aristotle gestures downward toward observation, experience, and the world around us. The painting captures one of the great tensions in Western thought: revelation and reason, idealism and empiricism, the eternal and the earthly. The Renaissance did not merely rediscover classical art. It reopened an entire philosophical conversation that had been unfolding for nearly two thousand years.
The Renaissance itself was, in many ways, an act of remembering. Forgotten texts resurfaced. Ancient philosophers returned to the conversation. Assumptions that had gone unquestioned for centuries were examined again.
Whether we’re talking about Plato, Plethon, Christianity, paganism, religious freedom, or the preservation of knowledge itself, the same questions keep appearing. What do we inherit from the past? What do we forget? What gets preserved, and what gets lost? And perhaps most importantly, who gets to decide?
I hope you enjoy this conversation with Collin Conkwright as much as I did. As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts, especially on our friendly disagreement about Christianity, empire, and whether those two worlds were destined to collide from the beginning or simply converged through the circumstances of history.
Until then, maintain your curiosity, embrace skepticism, and keep tuning in! 🎙️🔒
SOURCES: Adams, John. A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America. London: C. Dilly, 1787–1788.
Buckley, Thomas J. Establishing Religious Freedom. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013.
Freneau, Philip. On the Universality and Other Attributes of the God of Nature. In Poems Written Between the Years 1768 & 1794, 395–396. Monmouth, NJ: Printed at the press of the author, 1795.
Holmes, David L. The Faiths of Our Founding Fathers. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia. Philadelphia: Prichard and Hall, 1788.
Jefferson, Thomas. The Statute for Religious Freedom. 1777–1786. Manuscript, Virginia.
Madison, James. Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments. 1785. Manuscript, Virginia.
Paine, Thomas. Age of Reason. London: J. Watson, 1794–1807.
What Christianity Absorbed, Built, and Left Behind
Listen as you read here!
People say this all the time.
That the West got its ideas about pluralism, tolerance, and liberty from Christianity. That without it, there would be no concept of human dignity, no rights, no freedom in the modern sense. And that if those things feel unstable now, the solution is simple: return to the source.
The claim that pluralism, tolerance, and liberty are direct inheritances of Christianity is not just oversimplified. It reverses the historical pattern.
In Part 1, I pushed back on the idea that Christianity “founded the West” in any clean or singular sense, or that returning to it offers an obvious path forward. In Part 2, I stepped back and looked at something more fundamental: the fragility of freedom itself. Not as an abstract ideal, but as a social order that depends on limits, restraint, and a population capable of sustaining it. More importantly, I looked at how quickly that order begins to break down when those conditions are no longer present.
Across the responses to both pieces, there was a shared sense that something is not working. Not just politically, not just culturally, but at a deeper level that is harder to name.
One way to make sense of that is to stop looking for a single cause and start looking at how the whole inheritance fits together.
Western civilization did not develop along one track. It emerged through multiple layers operating at the same time. At a minimum, those layers include institutions, culture, and psychology.
Institutions include law, political authority, and the distribution of power. Culture includes religion, tradition, identity, and shared meaning. Psychology includes the moral instincts people use to interpret the world: instincts tied to fairness, loyalty, authority, purity, harm, belonging, and threat.
For long stretches of time, those layers reinforced one another. Institutions reflected shared values. Cultural traditions gave meaning to authority. Moral instincts were channeled through forms of life that provided both order and legitimacy.
But that fit was never permanent.
When those layers begin to pull apart, the result is not merely disagreement. It is instability.
That is the backdrop for this final piece.
The goal here is not to argue that Christianity caused the West, or that it deserves credit for everything people now associate with Western civilization. It is also not to reduce Christianity to a purely destructive force. Both approaches distort the picture in different ways.
The same problem appears in the phrase “Judeo-Christian values.” This often creates the impression of a smooth and unified inheritance, when the actual history is far more fractured. Judaism and Christianity are related, but they are not interchangeable. Christianity did not simply preserve Jewish covenantal thought. It reinterpreted it, universalized it, and claimed fulfillment over it. A tradition rooted in a particular people, law, land, and covenant was recast as a universal message for all mankind.
This repositioning changed the role of religion entirely. It no longer sits alongside other domains. It began to judge them.
It loosened religion from peoplehood and place. It made belief itself the primary marker of belonging. And once belief becomes the primary boundary, disagreement takes on a different moral weight.
Today’s article will address the harder question:
What did Christianity reorganize, what did it scale, and what did it leave unstable?
Because Christianity’s real inheritance was not simply compassion, liberty, or dignity. It reshaped how belief, authority, identity, and moral obligation functioned at a civilizational level. It expanded moral language in ways that could operate across large populations, but it also introduced sharper boundaries between true and false belief, salvation and error, belonging and exclusion.
That combination, expansion on one side and constraint on the other, is where the inheritance becomes complicated.
McClees, Helen and Christine Alexander. 1933. The Daily Life of the Greeks and Romans: As Illustrated in the Classical Collections, 5th ed. pp. 131, 133, fig. 159, New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
SECTION I: THE GOOD What Christianity Absorbed and Reorganized
Before getting into what Christianity actually contributed, it’s worth being clear about what is usually attributed to it.
A moral framework. Stable family structures. The unification of fragmented tribal societies into something resembling a shared civilization. A sense of cohesion strong enough to hold large populations together.
Those developments did happen. The question is where they came from…
Because none of those things begin with Christianity. They depend on something older: stability across generations, shared practices, inherited obligations, and a way of life that binds people before it explains itself.
That is what tradition is.
The word itself comes from the Latin traditio: a handing over, a passing down, something delivered across generations. But that definition only gets you so far. Tradition is not just a set of ideas preserved in texts or doctrines. It is lived. It shows up in habits, rituals, inherited gestures, seasonal rhythms, family patterns, and the quiet repetition of things people do not always stop to explain but continue to do anyway.
It exists in the structure of daily life.
You see it most clearly in how societies deal with death.
Long before Christianity became dominant in Europe, burial practices already reflected a deep sense of connection between the living and the dead. In the Stone Age, communities used mass graves in caves or pits. Later, megalithic cultures constructed communal tombs that anchored memory to specific places. Indo-European groups developed barrows and cremation practices that changed over time while preserving the same underlying logic.
The dead were not discarded. They were placed, remembered, and integrated into the ongoing life of the community.
Tradition, in that sense, is not something invented at a particular moment. It is something carried forward, shaped and reshaped over time without losing its original intention.
Christianity enters into that world rather than creating it from scratch.
What changes is not the existence of tradition, but its scale and its organizing thought.
Earlier religious life was largely tied to local identity: tribe, land, household, ancestry, city, and people. Christianity expands beyond that. It speaks in universal terms and builds a shared symbolic order that can operate across regions and populations that do not share the same lineage, gods, rituals, or customs.
That increases the reach of the moral imagination.
Concern no longer stops at the boundary of immediate belonging. It extends outward, attaching value to individuals beyond their role within a specific family, tribe, or city. Over time, that broader vision feeds into developments people now associate with the Western inheritance: ideas about dignity, education, care for the poor, moral responsibility, and obligation toward those outside one’s immediate circle.
But this is typically where the story gets oversimplified.
Those impulses did not originate with Christianity. Traditions within the Greco-Roman world had already developed forms of civic responsibility, philanthropy, patronage, public works, and mutual obligation. Grain distributions, civic benefaction, philosophical ethics, and local forms of duty were not Christian inventions.
But even the Greco-Roman world was not self-contained. It had already absorbed influences from older and neighboring civilizations (Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Anatolian, and Phoenician) through trade, conquest, and cultural exchange. As scholars like Martin L. West and Walter Burkert have shown, Greek thought itself was shaped in part by these eastern traditions.
The ancient world was not morally empty before the church arrived. It was already layered, interconnected, and carrying forward inherited forms of order, obligation, and meaning.
You can see this clearly in Stoic thought. Christianity is often treated as if it introduced universal human concern into a cruel and indifferent ancient world. Stoicism already spoke in universal terms. It could describe human beings as participants in a shared moral order and extend concern beyond tribe, city, or immediate kinship.
But the structure was different.
The bronze Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius, Capitoline Hill, Rome.
Runar Thorsteinsson’s comparison of Roman Christianity and Roman Stoicism helps clarify the distinction. Stoicism could speak of universal humanity without making moral belonging depend on conversion to a saving truth. Early Christianity, by contrast, carried a universal message while also drawing a sharper boundary around religious adherence. Its moral vision expanded outward, but it did so through a division between those inside and outside the saving order.
Christianity did not invent universal concern but it did reorganize it.
It took older moral instincts, philosophical ideas, Jewish inheritance, Roman scale, and local traditions, then bound them into a universal religious narrative. It gave those instincts a broader scope, a more unified story, and a more durable institutional form.
But expansion alone does not explain why a civilization holds together.
A social order lasts when it fits the way people already experience the world.
People do not move through life as detached rational observers. They respond through instinct: loyalty and betrayal, fairness and injustice, authority and rebellion, purity and contamination, belonging and threat. These instincts do not operate on their own. They cluster.
In more traditional societies, moral intuitions tend to reinforce one another. Care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and a sense of the sacred operate together rather than pulling apart. Even when people disagree, they often draw from the same underlying moral vocabulary when interpreting what is happening around them.
That shared moral vocabulary gives a society stability.
Christianity operated at that level.
It did not simply present moral rules. It gave instinct narrative form and placed it inside a larger story about meaning, suffering, hierarchy, obligation, sin, redemption, and ultimate reality. It offered a way of interpreting the world itself.
For people living in unstable conditions, where political authority could be inconsistent and survival uncertain, that kind of story organized experience. It offered coherence in a world that might otherwise feel random. It placed individuals inside a larger order and gave meaning to suffering, duty, death, and loss.
Once that fit took hold between cultural meaning, institutional power, and moral instinct, it became difficult to dislodge.
At the same time, Christianity did not remain completely closed off to innovative thought. Even within a religious order that emphasized authority and inherited truth, there were moments where that inheritance was tested from within.
Peter Abelard represents one of those moments.
His importance lies less in the drama of his life and more in the method he applied to truth itself. The intellectual world he entered was structured around inherited authority. Figures like Augustine were treated as settled voices, and the role of the student was often to understand, organize, and transmit what had already been established.
Peter Abelard with Book Giclee
Reasoning had a place, but it operated within limits. It was expected to clarify, not destabilize.
Abelard did not reject the tradition from the outside. He worked within it and exposed its internal tensions. In Sic et Non, he placed authoritative statements side by side in a way that made contradiction difficult to ignore.
If these sources were meant to provide certainty, why did they diverge so sharply?
If truth had already been handed down in a unified form, why did it fracture under comparison?
He treated those questions as a starting point rather than a threat to avoid.
“For it is from doubt that we arrive at questioning, and in questioning we arrive at truth.”
That quote represents the change in intellectual posture.
Instead of beginning with certainty and using reason to defend it, Abelard begins with tension and uses reason to work through it. Authority alone no longer settles the issue. Claims must be examined, language clarified, and assumptions tested.
Once questioning becomes legitimate, authority can no longer rely on transmission alone. It now has to also persuade.
Abelard pushed beyond accepted limits. He applied reason to doctrines often treated as beyond rational explanation and placed greater emphasis on intention in moral evaluation. In doing so, he opened space for a more nuanced understanding of ethics, one not entirely bound to inherited categories.
The response to him was what you would expect from institutional power.
He was condemned. His works were burned. He was brought before councils that were less interested in exploring his arguments and more so in containing their implications. The reaction showed what was at stake. A religious order grounded in authority does not easily absorb a method that legitimizes doubt.
And yet the method persisted.
Even when his specific conclusions were rejected, the habit of inquiry he modeled proved difficult to suppress. The practice of setting opposing views side by side and working through contradiction became central to scholasticism. The intellectual tradition that later shaped medieval universities carried forward elements of an approach once treated as dangerous.
Abelard does not stand alone as the cause of a broader intellectual reopening. The recovery of classical texts, the reintroduction of Aristotle, contact with Islamic and Jewish scholarship, and the growth of educational institutions all played a role.
What his story represents is the shift in attitude.
Inherited knowledge no longer functions as a sealed inheritance. It became something that can be examined, refined, and, within limits, challenged.
Of course, those constraints never fully disappeared.
Abelard was allowed to question, but not indefinitely. He was permitted to reason, but not without consequence. The same religious culture that made his work possible also defined where it had to stop.
That tension between authority and inquiry did not remain confined to intellectual life. It also carried forward into the institutions that developed over time.
A university lecture (an illustration from the second half of the 14th century).
The medieval university is one of the clearest places to see this pattern at work. Often treated as a distinctly Christian achievement, it grew out of a much broader mix of influences.
In Spain, Baghdad, and Cairo, Islamic schools, libraries, and observatories held resources far beyond anything available in much of Europe at the time. Arab, Jewish, and Christian scholars shared intellectual interests through expanding trade networks and translation movements. After the Christian capture of Toledo in 1085, that city became one of the key places where these worlds met, allowing texts to move across languages, traditions, and religious boundaries.
The Western reopening of inquiry did not happen because Europe simply looked inward and rediscovered itself.
It happened because knowledge traveled.
Averroes’ commentaries on Aristotle, translated into Latin, became essential sources for thirteenth-century Christian intellectuals, including Thomas Aquinas. That alone should complicate any idea that Christian scholarship developed in isolation. The university absorbed, translated, debated, and reorganized knowledge that had already passed through Greek, Arabic, Jewish, and Latin traditions.
Islamic Astronomers #1 is a photograph by Science Source
Even the structure of medieval universities reflects that broader inheritance. They developed their own corporate identities, governed collectively by masters, with distinct curricula and examination systems. By the late thirteenth century, Master of Arts could vastly outnumber Master of Theology. Historian Charles Freeman notes one example where 120 teachers of the arts were listed against only 15 Masters of Theology. That imbalance tells you what mattered most. The curriculum leaned heavily on classical texts, not purely Christian foundations.
Christian Europe helped institutionalize learning, but the material being organized was older, broader, and more cosmopolitan than the church-centered story suggests. The university becomes another example of Christianity’s larger pattern: it absorbed existing goods, gave them institutional form, and placed them inside its own theological horizon.
But the results did not move in one direction.
The same religious vision that could support care and dignity could also justify hierarchy and control. Because the tradition depended on scriptural interpretation, and interpretation depended on authority, very different conclusions could emerge from the same source material.
That instability is not only a matter of later interpretation. It is already present in the texts themselves.
The Gospels do not present a single, unified account. They offer overlapping portraits that do not fully align.
In Gospel of Matthew and Gospel of Mark, Jesus cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” while in Gospel of John, he concludes, “It is finished.” The tone shifts from abandonment to completion.
The timeline shifts as well, with the Synoptic Gospels placing the final meal at Passover, while John places the crucifixion before it begins.
Even the ethical posture is not entirely consistent: in Matthew, Jesus teaches “turn the other cheek,” while in Luke, he tells his followers, “Let the one who has no sword sell his cloak and buy one.”
Taken together, these are not minor discrepancies. They open space for fundamentally different readings of what the tradition demands.
Christianity persists not as a fixed form, but as a tradition capable of producing multiple, competing forms while still claiming continuity.
This becomes especially clear in debates over slavery.
Christians were involved in abolition movements, and that history is part of the record. The language of universal moral equality played a real role in mobilizing opposition to slavery and reshaping moral expectations.
But that is not the whole story.
The same texts were also used to defend slavery, reinforce it, and argue that existing social orders were divinely sanctioned.
That contradiction is not incidental. It reveals something important about the Christian inheritance itself.
A religious order that combines universal moral language with authoritative texts creates the conditions for both expansion and constraint. It can push moral concern outward, but it can also bind that concern within approved categories. The outcome depends on who interprets the texts, which authorities prevail, and what social pressures shape the reading.
Critics of abolitionist movements, including Thomas Carlyle, argued that what they saw as abstract humanitarian concern could override more immediate obligations or practical realities. A contemporary political cartoon captured this dynamic under the phrase “telescopic philanthropy”—a tendency to focus moral concern at a distance while neglecting what is closer at hand.
The point I’m trying to make here is not that concern beyond one’s own group is inherently false or wrong.
The point is that moral expansion creates distance.
The farther a concern stretches, the easier it becomes to neglect concrete obligations close at hand: family, neighbors, local order, inherited duties, and the people one is actually responsible for. Abstract compassion can become morally flattering precisely because it asks less of the person expressing it.
Whether one agrees with those criticisms or not, they point to something very real.
A moral order that expands obligation beyond local belonging gains reach, but it also risks losing proportion. It can elevate the stranger while forgetting the neighbor. It can speak beautifully about mankind while failing the people right in front of it.
Christianity extended moral concern beyond tribe and built institutions that carried that vision forward. But it also introduced pressures around authority, interpretation, exclusion, and the limits of acceptable thought.
The good is real, but…so is the tension inside it.
Christianity’s inheritance was not simply compassion, dignity, or education. It was a moral architecture: universal in scope, institutional in form, inward in psychology, and unstable once detached from the cultural world that had once held it together.
That brings us to our next inquiry.
Not just what Christianity gave the West, but what kind of order made those outcomes possible.
SECTION II — THE BAD
Truth, Authority, and the Limits of Inquiry
At this point, the issue is not simply what happened when Christianity moved from the margins to power. I’ve explored that elsewhere: the suppression of rival systems, the narrowing of acceptable thought, and the long habit of treating competing worldviews not as alternatives to debate, but as errors to contain.
The deeper question here is more structural.
What kind of religious order produces those outcomes in the first place?
Because the shift was a reorganization of how truth operated, how disagreement was handled, and how legitimacy was defined.
Earlier Greco-Roman religious and philosophical life was not tolerant in the modern sense, but it was more comfortable with multiplicity. Rival schools, local cults, household gods, civic rituals, and philosophical traditions could coexist without requiring one totalizing creed to absorb or eliminate the rest. That did not make the ancient world peaceful or morally pure. It did mean that truth was not always treated as one fragile object that had to be protected from every rival.
The Abrahamic worldview introduced something different, often called the “Mosaic distinction.”
God giving the Tablets of the Law to Moses, from a manuscript attributed to Chrétien Legouais, 1325 CE. Image source: gallica.bnf.fr / Bibliothèque municipal de Rouen
It drew a sharper line between true and false in a way that changed the stakes of disagreement. Belief was no longer simply one option among many. It became a dividing line. Once that line was drawn, alternative ways of seeing the world did not remain neutral. They became errors, and error began to carry drastic consequences beyond private belief.
If truth is singular and binding, then the religious order has to decide what to do with everything outside of it. Some ideas are absorbed. Some are tolerated for a time. Others are pushed out entirely. But none of them sit comfortably alongside it anymore. They exist in tension with the claim that one truth must govern above all others.
As we previously discussed, Christianity is often credited with preserving learning and building universities, and that claim is not false. Medieval universities became important institutions for intellectual training, debate, law, theology, medicine, and philosophy. They helped organize knowledge and gave scholastic inquiry a durable form.
But that achievement has to be kept in proportion.
The medieval university was an achievement, but it was not a recovery of classical freedom. It was classical inheritance under theological supervision.
Ancient philosophy could be studied, but it had to be reconciled with Christian doctrine. Aristotle could return, but not as Aristotle alone. He had to be interpreted through Christian categories, corrected where necessary, and placed beneath revealed truth. Reason was permitted, even sharpened, but it was not sovereign.
The medieval university did not represent inquiry on open ground. It represented inquiry inside boundaries. Reason could clarify doctrine, defend doctrine, organize doctrine, and reconcile contradictions within inherited authorities. But when reason pressed too far against the architecture of belief, the limits became quite visible.
That does not make medieval learning worthless. It makes it conditional.
And that conditionality is the point.
Christian Europe did not simply preserve the classical world. It received it, edited it, baptized it, and constrained it. What could be made useful to the Christian order survived more easily. What threatened that order did not.
This is the kind of intellectual narrowing later critics would recognize in Christianity’s relationship to philosophy. Heidegger’s critique of onto-theology is not aimed at Christianity alone, but it helps name the pattern: open-ended questioning becomes absorbed into a prior explanatory order. Instead of wonder remaining primary, inquiry is routed through established claims about creation, causality, divine order, sin, and salvation.
The question is no longer allowed to remain fully open.
It has to be answered inside the architecture of doctrine.
Once orthodoxy is established it operates within boundaries that have already been set, and stepping outside those boundaries starts to carry not just intellectual consequences, but social ones. Access to authority, education, and influence becomes tied, at least in part, to alignment.
At that point, belief is no longer just something people hold. It becomes something that moves outward, seeking to correct and expand.
SECTION III: THE UGLY
Universalism, Power, and the Moral Afterlife
By the time you reach the modern West, the question is no longer whether Christianity shaped it. That much is obvious. The deeper issue is what, exactly, it left behind, and what happens when the conditions that once sustained that inheritance begin to unravel.
Christianity did not simply introduce a set of beliefs and then fade as those beliefs weakened. It reorganized moral life at a level that persists long after doctrine loses its authority. It changed how individuals understood themselves, how they related to others, where moral responsibility resided, and how truth was expected to move through the world.
The ugly side of the Christian inheritance is not merely universalism. It is universalism with a missionary engine.
Christianity does not simply say, “This is true.” It says truth must be spread. Error must be corrected. The world must be brought into submission to the saving order. That structure changes the meaning of difference. A rival worldview is not merely foreign, local, or ancestral. It becomes spiritually demonic.
And once a difference becomes an error, correction can be justified as mercy.
The religious world Christianity emerges from was already in tension with the surrounding Greek and Roman order. Second Temple Judaism didn’t simply blend into Hellenistic life. Again and again, it resisted it—politically, culturally, religiously.
D. H. Lawrence saw this tendency clearly. In Apocalypse, he describes a fear-driven impulse within Christianity—a refusal to leave other ways of understanding the world intact. Not just disagreement, but the drive to overcome, absorb, or eliminate what stands outside the truth.
That instinct is already embedded in the apocalyptic world Christianity emerges from. Second Temple Judaism carries expectations of final judgment, cosmic conflict, and the ultimate victory of a single, rightful order-the coming of the Moshiach/Messiah.) Christianity inherits that framework and gives it a wider reach.
That is where Christianity’s relationship to Rome becomes essential. Christian universalism did not spread on its own. It moved through the late imperial Roman systems: roads, cities, law, administration, literacy, political centralization, and habits of governance already trained toward scale. The faith did not merely conquer Rome. It also inherited Rome’s machinery.
Rome gave Christianity infrastructure. Christianity gave Rome a sacred moral horizon. Together, they helped produce a form of power that could move across peoples, lands, languages, and customs while claiming to operate in the name of truth rather than mere domination.
This is also why Christianity receives too much credit for goods it did not invent.
One reason it’s treated as the source of Western morality is that it became dominant enough to absorb older goods and narrate them backward as Christian achievements. Care for the poor, philosophical inquiry, civic duty, moral discipline, education, and concern for the common good did not appear out of nowhere when Christianity entered history. Many of these were already present in Greek, Roman, Jewish, and local European worlds. Christianity reorganized them inside its own story.
That reorganization gave them reach.
But it also gave them a new master narrative.
Older traditions were often embedded in particular peoples, places, households, ancestors, cities, gods, calendars, and sacred landscapes. Religion was not just a private belief system. It was woven into the life of a people. Christianity altered that relationship by making belief portable. It could cross borders, override local cults, and create a community defined less by blood, land, or inherited custom than by shared confession.
That is one of the most consequential shifts in Western history.
Christianity weakened the older link between people, place, ancestors, and gods. It did not erase those attachments overnight, and in practice it often absorbed local festivals, sacred sites, and folk customs. But the deeper logic changed. The highest belonging was no longer rooted primarily in the local or ancestral. It was relocated into a universal religious identity.
Conversion, then, was not merely persuasion. It was the remaking of belonging.
A people could be separated from their gods, their rituals, their inherited calendar, their sacred places, and their ancestral memory, then folded into a new universal story that claimed to redeem them while also replacing the world that formed them.
Not every conversion was violent. That would be too simple. Some conversions were gradual, political, strategic, sincere, blended, or partial. But once that universal truth claim became tied to salvation, rival traditions do not remain equal neighbors. They become obstacles to be overcome, errors to be corrected, or remnants to be absorbed.
The First Crusade: Pope Urban II and Jerusalem vs. Diplomatic Unification
The crusades make this structure visible in its most explicit and militarized form.
They were not only political wars. They were religious wars shaped by sacred geography, penitential promise, and the belief that violence could be folded into a redemptive order.
The Crusades did not simply mobilize Europe—they redirected it toward Jerusalem, a sacred center that was not its own.
That does not mean every participant had the same motive, and it does not mean politics, land, wealth, status, and military ambition were irrelevant. Of course they mattered. But the crusading imagination reveals something specific: once warfare is placed inside a sacred story, conquest can be interpreted as obedience, purification, defense, or salvation.
That is the danger of missionary structure joined to power.
It sanctifies expansion.
And this is not confined to medieval history. The same basic pattern can reappear whenever politics inherits religious moral intensity. The opponent is no longer merely wrong about policy. He becomes a threat to truth, justice, salvation, progress, safety, democracy, equality, or whatever sacred term now carries the old theological weight.
At that point, disagreement becomes harder to contain.
The modern West inherited this moral intensity even as explicit Christian authority declined. Most people inherited a world in which Christianity had already begun to lose its grip, but nothing fully replaced it. The rituals became optional. The authority fractured. Yet many of the underlying assumptions remained intact.
What had once been explicitly theological was gradually translated into secular terms.
At the center of that structure is a form of universalism Christianity helped entrench: the idea that all people stand beneath one moral order, that identity is secondary to a broader human category, and that truth applies universally rather than locally. That assumption did not disappear with religious decline. It migrated.
Liberalism, in many of its modern forms, carries that template forward: the individual abstracted from place, lineage, inherited duty, and thick communal belonging, then positioned inside a universal framework of rights, equality, and moral expectation.
The language changes. The structure does not.
The West moved from Christian universalism to liberal universalism without seriously interrogating the universalism itself. It replaced theological justification with philosophical or political justification, but it retained the assumption that the highest moral order transcends particular identities rather than emerging from them.
And what carries forward is not only universal morality, but missionary mentality.
Salvation becomes progress. Sin becomes injustice. Heresy becomes hate. Evangelism becomes activism. The world must still be corrected. The morally backward must still be brought into line.
And the irony is hard to miss. The same people who pride themselves on rejecting religious dogma often reproduce its structure almost perfectly—moral certainty, heresy-hunting, and the impulse to correct and convert, just without calling it religion.
You can see this most clearly in the modern left, especially in its activist and radical edges. What presents itself as political theory often behaves like secularized salvation mythology. The infrastructure is unchanged: the world is broken and the masses need liberation. God is removed, but everything else remains. The heretics still need correction. Sin becomes hierarchy. Salvation becomes self-rule. The missionary doesn’t disappear—he just changes form.
It still sorts people into the righteous and the condemned. It still creates moral taboos. It still treats disagreement as contamination. It still imagines that the world can be redeemed if only the right moral order is imposed—with enough force, shame, education, policy, or institutional pressure.
That is not the absence of Christianity.
It is part of its afterlife.
Later European expansion, and even modern geopolitical projects, often operate within the same structure—intervention framed as liberation, reform, or progress.
Whenever universal moral claims are aligned with power and tied to the belief that truth must spread, action begins to feel necessary rather than optional.
To understand why it persists, and why it adapts so easily across different historical contexts, you have to look at what is happening at a deeper level. Not just in institutions or empires, but within the individual.
Because the most enduring change Christianity introduces is not only institutional.
It is psychological. It altered where morality is located.
In earlier classical traditions, especially in Aristotle, the moral life is oriented outward. The Greek conception of eudaimonia assumes that human beings can develop toward excellence. Flourishing is cultivated through practice, discipline, rational activity, and participation in the world. Character is formed through what one does, and the moral life is outward, embodied, and lived over time within a shared civic and social context.
Christianity, especially through Augustine of Hippo, redirects that focus inward.
The problem is no longer simply what a person does, but what a person is. Human nature itself becomes suspect, marked from the beginning. The doctrine of original sin reframes the individual not as someone developing toward excellence, but as someone starting already compromised. This is not just about isolated wrongdoing. It is about a baseline disorder built into human existence, transmitted across generations, shaping inclination before any conscious choice is made.
From that premise, morality reorganizes itself accordingly. If the problem lies within, then moral evaluation cannot remain limited to outward behavior. It extends inward, into thought, desire, intention, and impulse—the parts of life no one else sees but are still treated as morally significant.
Fra Angelico, The Conversion of St. Augustine (c. 1430−1435)
This becomes structured into daily practice. Monastic traditions classify internal states (temptation, pride, doubt, desire) as if they were items that could be named, tracked, and corrected. Authority expands beyond regulating behavior into defining what counts as acceptable thought, shaping not just action but the boundaries of the inner life itself.
Once it relocates inward, the primary site of regulation is no longer only the community. It is the individual mind, where conscience, guilt, confession, fear, and self-regulation operate continuously, often without any visible external enforcement.
You can see the implications of this in the conflict between Augustine and Pelagius. Pelagius emphasizes human capacity: the ability to choose, improve, and take responsibility for moral development. Augustine rejects that position, insisting on dependence—on God’s grace, on divine intervention, on something beyond human effort.
This is not only a theological disagreement.
It is also a question about agency.
If the individual cannot fully rely on their own capacity to move toward the good, then moral development becomes entangled with God’s authority. Responsibility does not disappear, but it no longer stands on its own. It becomes mediated, conditioned, and in some cases limited, as the individual is situated within a framework that places ultimate transformation outside of purely human reach.
Over time, that tension begins to shape intellectual life as well. Historians like Charles Freeman do not argue that inquiry simply disappeared, but that the conditions surrounding it changed. When belief becomes tied to salvation, and when error carries not only intellectual but spiritual consequences, curiosity itself begins to look different. Questions are no longer neutral exercises. They take on moral weight, and in certain contexts, they begin to carry risk.
Writers like Thomas Paine noticed this and pushed directly against the idea that truth can rest on inherited authority. In The Age of Reason, Paine argues that revelation, once it passes through human hands, can no longer function as unquestionable truth. What begins as divine claim becomes human interpretation, and therefore something that must be examined rather than simply accepted. That move cuts directly against the structure that treats questioning as risk. It reopens the possibility that belief itself should be subject to the same scrutiny as anything else.
Mark A. Noll describes a similar pattern in later Christian intellectual culture: a tendency to preserve belief rather than extend it. Questioning is not always welcomed as curiosity. It can be interpreted as disloyalty, a sign that alignment is weakening rather than deepening. The safest position, in that environment, becomes one of conformity rather than exploration.
The obedient mind is the secure mind.
This is not new. It is already visible earlier in the tradition. The same system that could produce figures like Abelard (where questioning began to reopen) also produces the conditions Noll is describing, where belief becomes something to preserve rather than extend.
The instinct to monitor thought, to moralize disagreement, to treat deviation as more than error—those habits do not emerge in a vacuum. They develop within specific historical conditions, and they persist even as the surrounding language changes.
This is why the internal reorganization matters.
It is not only about doctrine.
It is about how individuals learn to relate to themselves.
If Augustine relocates morality inward, Protestantism amplifies and personalizes that shift. The individual is placed in more direct relation to truth, expected to read, interpret, examine, and align himself without the same mediating structures that once guided that process. Authority does not vanish. It becomes more diffuse and more demanding.
The church hierarchy may weaken in some places, but new pressures emerge through scripture, sermon, household discipline, community surveillance, literacy, and conscience. The individual is made more responsible before God, but also more exposed.
The burden of interpretation moves further into the self.
Over time, that inward structure detaches from the communal and cultural worlds that once gave it shape. What remains is a society of individuals expected to interpret, justify, and regulate themselves inside a universal moral order, but without a shared culture capable of holding that process together.
That misalignment becomes visible in how people interpret conflict, identity, history, and political life.
In modern America, this can still be seen in forms of biblical literalism, dispensationalism, and end-times prophecy that shape how many Christians understand Israel, war, nationhood, and world events. These beliefs do not remain private. They influence political imagination. They affect how people interpret history, alliances, enemies, and what they believe is inevitable or divinely sanctioned.
In this context, belief stops being just belief. It starts shaping how everything else is seen.
That is the same mechanism operating in another key. The pattern that once defined orthodoxy and constrained variation does not disappear. It adapts as the cultural environment shifts. The language evolves, but the underlying habit remains… truth is singular, error is dangerous, and those outside the moral order must be corrected, converted, contained, or cast out.
What this reveals is not a simple story of progress or decline.
Christianity did not leave behind a stable moral foundation that the West either followed or abandoned. It left behind a set of interacting pressures: universalism and particular identity, internalized morality and external authority, individual responsibility and collective order, compassion and conquest, salvation and exclusion.
For a time, those pressures could be held in relative balance, but this fit no longer holds.
The institutions remain, but they no longer command the same trust. The moral instincts remain, but they are no longer guided by a shared tradition. The universal language remains, but it floats above increasingly fractured peoples, places, and loyalties.
Conflict becomes more moralized. Disagreement becomes harder to contain.
This is why the modern West feels both thin and volatile.
Thin, because inherited forms of continuity have weakened.
Volatile, because the moral pressure embedded in the inheritance remains, now operating without the older structures that once gave it proportion.
That is the condition the modern West has inherited.
CONCLUSION: Why the West Still Cannot Escape the Problem
The Christian inheritance of the West cannot be reduced to either gratitude or resentment.
It gave moral concern, meaning to suffering, durable institutions, and the preservation and transmission of knowledge, even as that knowledge was filtered through doctrine. It created a shared moral vocabulary capable of binding large populations together.
But it also changed the terms of belonging.
It loosened religion from peoplehood, place, ancestry, and local custom. It made belief portable. It turned truth into something singular and binding, making disagreement morally charged. Once rival traditions became errors rather than neighbors, the pressure to absorb, correct, or suppress them followed naturally.
The West did not abandon Christianity so much as carry its habits forward. The missionary impulse remained. The abstract individual remained. The suspicion of rooted identity remained. Social Justice became their new end times.
That is why a return to Christianity does not solve the problem. It would not restore a stable foundation but reassert one layer of the inheritance while leaving its tensions unresolved.
Secular liberalism does not solve it either. It often preserves the universalism while stripping away the cultural limits that once gave it proportion, asking people to live as abstract individuals inside a moral framework detached from place, memory, and inherited obligation.
What remains is not a coherent worldview, but a contradictory one.
From the beginning, the inheritance carried competing impulses. Early Christianity emerged from an apocalyptic environment while also developing moral and institutional frameworks for life within the world. Over time, those tensions were not resolved but reworked and emphasized in different ways.
Within Protestantism alone, some strands treated the world as something to be ordered and reformed, energizing movements like abolition, while others emphasized its corruption and eventual end, orienting life toward endurance and escape. The divergence is not a break from the tradition, but a difference in emphasis within it.
The result is a system that can point in opposite directions while still claiming the same foundation.
This is not a foundation a civilization can stand on.
A civilization needs moral scale, but also proportion. Compassion, but not so abstract that it forgets its own people. Rights, but not detached from duty. Inquiry, but not subordinated to sacred certainty. Space for disagreement, but enough shared identity to keep it from becoming civilizational warfare.
Above all, it needs rooted obligations.
A civilization cannot survive on abstract principles alone. It needs loyalty, shared memory, boundaries, place, and a people capable of recognizing what is theirs to preserve.
Because removing structure does not remove power. It removes the forms that make power visible and accountable. And when that happens, power does not disappear. It shifts—into forms that are harder to see and harder to resist.
We are not standing outside this inheritance.
We are still working within it.
And the task is not to romanticize Christianity, completely demonize it, or pretend we have escaped it, but to understand what it absorbed, what it built, what it destabilized, and what it left behind clearly enough to stop repeating its most destructive patterns.
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Doner, Colonel V. “Cognitive Dissonance of Political Activists, Or Whatever Happened to the Religious Right?” Chalcedon, July 1, 1999.
Freeman, Charles. The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason. London: Heinemann, 2002.
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